


Lionheart

by tfm



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Child Abuse, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-01-31 06:10:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 49,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21441502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: Seven shapeshifters meet at the Nestled Nook Inn in Trostenwald, and call it fate. Or rather, six shapeshifters, and a monk pretending to be a shapeshifter.Beau is on the run from a family that wants to kill her, hiding a secret from a family that she doesn't know about yet. Eventually, it's all going to come crashing down.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett & The Mighty Nein, Beauregard Lionett & Yasha, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, past Yasha/Zuala - Relationship
Comments: 96
Kudos: 693





	1. One

One

The parentage of the only child of the Lionett family was an open secret. She was, after all, of a darker complexion than either her mother or her father, a tone that was more akin to the handsome Marquesian diplomat that had visited the manor the previous summer.

From the day she was born, Beauregard knew that she was different. She did not, after all, have the signature shadow magic that all of her relatives had; could not summon spectral hounds, or see in the dark, or step among the shadows unseen. They could have, she thought, lived with that, if not for the other thing.

That was the thing they were going to kill her for. Beau didn’t think it was dramatic for her to say so; after all, they had told her in no uncertain terms, “Beauregard, the moment your brother’s adoption paperwork goes through, we have no use for you anymore.” It was pointless, after all, to have a child that could not carry on the family’s legacy. To kill her before then, though, was tantamount to admitting their darkest secret.

Ultimately, there were three reasons that Beau’s parents hated her: one, she was a girl. Two, she had no magic. Three, she was human. Beau was pretty sure that the first reason alone would have been enough, but adding on the other two was pretty much a guarantee that they would never openly acknowledge her relation to them. Instead, they shipped her off to a monastery the moment she became too much of a nuisance, and didn’t even bother coming to visit.

Beau wasn’t all that bothered. She had far too many scars (both physical and mental) from the years she had spent under her “father’s” iron thumb. The Cobalt Soul were strict (up at 6.a.m, training until 7.30, then breakfast, then morning meditation, etc.) but at least when they hurt her it was for a purpose.

That first week, the bruised knuckles, and the cracked ribs and the swollen jaw was a sign of pride, rather than of fear and shame. It told the world that Beauregard Lionett was a fighter, rather than a coward.

For almost three years, she was, if not happy there, then at least complacent. Though the reading got a little boring at times, and she felt stifled under all the godsdamned rules, it was safe. Though she was disciplined for every time she snuck out after hours (at least the times that they caught her) they had never beaten her just for the sake of doing so.

It was early in Unndilar that everything changed. Beau had spent a night tossing and turning through the pain of a cracked rib, when she’d heard the footsteps. Though they were making no great pains to stay silent, Beau shot up anyway, swearing as she grabbed for her staff. An arc of pain shot across her abdomen.

‘Beauregard,’ came a voice. Zeenoth’s voice. He sounded...He sounded afraid. ‘They are coming,’ he said.

That was all he needed to say. Beau jumped to her feet, and grabbed her bag. It was already packed for the eventuality she’d known was coming for years now, but had always hoped it was going to be just another day away.

The Cobalt Soul had promised to harbor her from her family, for as long as they were able, but even their power was not limitless. They could not go up against the power of a family of evil sorcerers, hellbent on murdering their wayward child, but they could at the very least give her fair warning.

Beau groaned. She had been so fucking close to falling asleep. ‘How far away?’

‘They left Kamordah three hours ago,’ Zeenoth told her. He was still whispering, and Beau had no idea why. It wasn’t as if her predicament was a secret. She knew the other acolytes whispered about it behind her back. Just another reason to pity poor Beauregard. Unloved by her family, unwanted by the Cobalt Soul…

If she left now, she could be well on the way to Rexxentrum before they knew she was gone. At least, that had been her plan, until Zeenoth said;

‘Travel north; a Cobalt Soul representative will meet you in Druvenlode.’ If the Cobalt Soul was expecting Beau to travel north, then she was absolutely not going to travel north. West, was of course, out of the question – she wasn’t about to go right into the jaws of the people trying to kill her – and the only thing East, aside from Felderwin, was Xhorhas.

No, Beau would go south, out of the Empire, and down into the Menagerie Coast. There were a lot of drifters down that way, or so she’d heard. She wouldn’t be too far out of place. Maybe she’d even be able to find passage on a ship across the Lucidian Ocean to Tal’Dorei.

She’d thought it through a lot. At least enough to have contingency plans, like if the Soul decided to have someone try to meet her in the north.

There was a part of her that had wondered maybe if her family would ever come; it had been so long since she’d left, after all. Perhaps they had forgotten about her; relegated her to a distant memory, one that they would never have to think about again.

Zeenoth handed her a change of clothes in darker, less blue colors. If they were looking for a Cobalt Soul acolyte, then she wasn’t going to make it easy for them. In black and grey, she would be just another wayward traveler, on the run from some dark past. Not uncommon in Wildemount; at least, that was what she’d read in library books.

Beau dressed quickly, and shoved her vestments into her pack. She wouldn’t wear them, for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention, but maybe they would be useful in other ways; as bandages, or as a decoy, perhaps.

‘Thank-you,’ she told Zeenoth, and he looked a little surprised at that. Beau had never been the easiest person to get along with. Maybe she should have been nicer to the people that had effectively rescued her from a life of pain, and torture, but the only thing she seemed to do was lash out. Sometimes she couldn’t quite help herself. ‘I know I haven’t…’ She shook her head. She didn’t need to say it. Or didn’t want to say it. Instead, she just said, ‘Thank-you.’

...

Beau traveled south, under the cloak of darkness. She didn’t dare travel by road, just in case anyone recognized her. The sad thing was, she had plenty of practice at traveling stealthily cross-country, leaving no trace for anyone to follow. At least, no trace for anyone that didn’t have a super-heightened sense of smell.

They were also looking for a non-shifter, which was why the first thing that Beau did was track down one of her old contacts in Alfield, and buy a decent supply of were-cat pheromones. The guy was a little unsure on the exact species, but that hardly seemed important. What was important was that she smelled like a shifter to other shifters. More importantly, the shifter smell masked her very distinct “human” smell, that any family assassin would be well-trained in seeking out. The scent of Beauregard Lionett would end in Alfield; if they wanted to track her down beyond that, then they would have to do it the old-fashioned way. The human way.

The fact that her family was evil enough to have assassins at their beck and call was some real dark lord shit, but sadly, not even the tip of the dungheap when it came to all the fucked up stuff her family had done to her.

Like, not even in the top five worst. At least death was quick.

That said, though, Beau had no plans of dying. She had spent her whole life trying to get away, only for them to drag her back. For a long time, she had considered that maybe death would be the easy way out, but no. She wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. She had been clinging to the edge of a life barely worth living for so long...it wasn’t until she had been forcibly dragged to the Cobalt Soul that she had had a real sense of what else was out there, of all the things that she had missed out on.

That was how Beauregard Lionett found herself, two days later, in a tavern in Trostenwald, drinking a very large tankard of ale. Not that she’d never had ale before; she’d snuck out of the house often enough, after learning how to pick the lock to her bedroom window, and the bartender of the local taverns pitied her enough not to ask too many questions. The fact that so many people in town knew what she was going through, and yet did nothing...well, it was with some decent hindsight that she now realized just how fucked up that was.

It was on her second day in Trostenwald that she saw them. She might not have had the nose of a were-lion, but she had spent enough time around shapeshifters to know their behavior. For one thing, they tended to hesitate before going into buildings, as though they preferred to be out in the open, where they could run away if necessary. Another thing was that they always had to inspect the cutlery before they used it. If there was even a trace of silver, then it could potentially end very badly. Beau had watched her father beat a servant, once, for failing to identify a silver fork in a gift from a visiting diplomat.

The half-orc and the tiefling were definitely shifters. Though they seemed friendly enough, they were eyeing other patrons of the bar with a veiled sort of suspicion, as though trying to figure out if anyone had picked up on their secret. Too late, Beau averted her gaze. The half-orc had definitely seen her staring.

_Ah, fuck, he was coming over_.

Beau flagged the bartender down, and ordered another beer. ‘You want something?’ she asked, when the half-orc sat down next to her. He could, no doubt, smell the pheromones that she had so carefully applied, even if he couldn’t quite place their origin. That was what Beau had heard from other shifters, anyway, especially with the big cats. Easy to tell that someone was a shifter, a little harder to pin down species sometimes, especially given so much of the scent was a variation on human.

‘There something I can help _you_ with?’ he asked, jovially. Yeah, definitely a shifter. Kind of small for a half-orc, too, and much more well-spoken than the few others that she’d met in her life.

‘Nope,’ Beau said.

‘You going to cause us any trouble?’

‘Nope.’ Trouble was the last thing Beau needed. What she needed, was to stay under the radar.

‘You want some company on the road?’

That question, she wasn’t expecting. “No,” was the obvious, immediate answer, but if her parents were looking for her, they would be looking for a single human traveling alone. They wouldn’t be looking for a shapeshifter traveling with other shapeshifters. Of course, it wouldn’t do her any favors to jump at the offer without even negotiating. Who was this guy that would ask a complete stranger whether they wanted to travel together? And why the fuck was Beau actually kind of thinking about saying “yes”?

‘What’s in it for me?’ she asked.


	2. Two

Two

The half-orc’s name was Fjord, and Beau could not, for the life of her, pin him down. He seemed entirely forthright and completely dishonest all at once, which was very disconcerting. She was a pretty good liar herself, but for some reason, whenever she told the absolute truth, people seemed to think she was lying anyway. The good news was, Fjord definitely didn’t seem to be as good as reading people as she was, and seemed to accept her lie of being a wandering traveler (that just so happened to be a  shapeshifter ) at face value.

‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Me and my friend, Jester—’ he gestured back towards the blue tiefling, who waved, ‘—came into town just a few days ago, just as that circus was going up.’ Beau had seen the circus; she had missed its last show by just a few hours, and was kind of grateful. The last thing that she needed was to watch a group of brightly colored weirdos juggling potatoes, or whatever it was that they did at circuses these days. The circus had been to Kamordah many times, but Beau’s parents had never deemed her worth the effort to actually take.

‘Well, I hope you had a good time,’ Beau said, dryly.

Fjord grinned, and when he did, Beau could see that his tusks had been filed back. Interesting. She wondered what variety of were he was, and whether or not that were form also had filed claws.

‘Sort of,’ Fjord admitted. ‘Until everything went pear-shaped, and the circus’s bouncer turned into a big fucking bear to take down a fiend.’

Beau raised an eyebrow. Were-bear. Nice. Probably one of the few were-forms that could take on a lion. Only, she didn’t see any security people around.

Fjord wasn’t finished. ‘And then, it turns out that the fortune-teller, he’s a shifter too. And then last night, we had drinks with a couple of magic-using folks, and they’re shifters too.’

‘Hell of a story,’ Beau said, not bothering to look Fjord in the eye. ‘Still haven’t heard how you can help me, though.’

‘I’m getting to that,’ Fjord said, in a voice that was clearly supposed to be charming. She didn’t bother telling him that he was barking up the wrong tree, no pun intended. ‘We got to talking about how it was a _mighty _coincidence that so many shifters ended up in town at the same time, and the fortune teller suggested that maybe fate had brought us together. Then we come in here, and find yet another shifter, sitting at the bar.’

Beau took a long sip of her drink. ‘Still not hearing anything I like.’ She was baiting him, and she was pretty sure he was starting to figure it out. After all, if she wasn’t a tiny bit interested, she would have just told him to fuck off.

She couldn’t deny the fact that so many shifters in town was a little bit fucking weird. It was true, shifters did tend to hang around in packs, but in Beau’s experience, that was more in settlements and towns, rather than on the road. To her, though, that was something to be really fucking suspicious about, rather than putting it down to the hand of fate.

‘Well, how about this,’ Fjord said. ‘You come in and meet everyone else, and I’ll buy your drinks for the evening.’

Beau grinned, and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Fjord, buddy. You should have fucking led with that.’

...

After that, Beau met a lot of people in very quick succession, something that was enough to sent her social anxiety into overdrive. She wasn’t great in crowds, or in small spaces, and in bigger groups of people, her lack of social graces tended to get the better of her. There was Fjord, of course, and Jester, the blue tiefling, and Mollymauk, a purple tiefling, who, based on his gaudy as fuck and entirely outrageous coat, was probably the fortune-teller, and Yasha, who was super fucking hot, and presumably the were-bear that Fjord had mentioned.

The last two were a little different. They seemed just as hesitant to be there as Beau did, and spent much of the meeting huddled in the corner, exchanging words in low whispers. The man was tall, and scruffy, and looked like he hadn’t taken a bath in weeks. If Beau actually had the senses of a were-lion, she was sure the smell of him would have made her eyes water. Even as it was, she could tell he hadn’t washed his clothes in weeks. His traveling companion was a great deal shorter, and wearing a mask that did absolutely nothing to hide the fact that she was, in fact, a goblin. Caleb and Nott, they called themselves, but there was something a little funny about the look on their faces when they introduced themselves.

Beau watched them closely, but turned her gaze when Jester started to talk.

They had booked a private parlor, apparently not wanting to be overheard by any suspicious locals, and then Fjord, apparently having done very well in card games the previous evening, had ordered food and drinks for everyone. Beau had been deprived of food and drinks often enough to enjoy a good thing while it lasted, and loaded her plate up with meats and bread.

‘I’m an ocelot,’ Jester said, apropos of nothing. Beau stopped with a piece of meat half-way to her mouth. She’d hadn’t really thought about the fact that she’d have to do this part, too. ‘My mama’s an ocelot, too.’

Mollymauk – Molly – the tiefling grinned. Beau decided immediately that she hated him. She wasn’t even sure why. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘As you know, Yasha’s a bear. I’m a peacock.’ Yasha was the hot barbarian that was approximately a hundred feet tall. Definitely a bear,  even if Beau hadn’t already been told that by Fjord . But the other part—

Beau choked on her  food . ‘A were-peacock? Are you fucking shitting me?’

‘Not even in the slightest,’ Molly said, proudly. ‘It was the greatest day of my life, the day the were-peacock attacked the circus.’

‘He’s a snow leopard,’ Yasha said, deadpan. Molly gave her an annoyed sort of look.

‘Why are you ruining my fun?’ he pouted.

‘They would have found out eventually.’

‘Yes, but not until the full moon.’

A horrified expression must have crossed Beau’s face, but she was pretty sure she hid it pretty quickly. Eventually, she would maybe probably be around these people during the full moon.

‘What about you, Beau?’ Jester asked, clearly noticing her forced silence, and apparently thinking that it was something else entirely.

‘Uh,’ Beau said. Since she wasn’t sure just how many lies she was going to be able to maintain, she decided to go for the closest thing possible to the truth. ‘Lion.’ Almost immediately, she remembered why that was just a really, really bad idea. There was a pained, awkward sort of silence. A silence that she should have been expecting ever since the conversation started. Hell, ever since meeting these weirdos. Beau didn’t have to ask why. The only places on Wildemount that you found were-lions were Kamordah and a few places scattered through Xhorhas. Since she was very clearly not Xhorhasian…

The look on their faces was one of surprise. Yasha, in particular had about as much emotion as Beau had ever seen on her face. In the  five whole minutes that they’d known each other, at least.

‘Beau, would your last name happen to be Lionett?’ Fjord asked, conversationally.

‘Yeah, it would be.’ Beau jutted out her chin, daring any one of them to comment. The Lionetts were a notorious family in the Empire, a clan of dark magic practitioners that just so happened to be were-lions. There used to be more were-lions in the world, Beau knew, until the Lionetts had wiped them out. And Beau had the luck to be neither a dark magic practitioner, nor a were-lion, and yet still saddled with their shitty name. It was a pretty big inconvenience. Probably another reason why she definitely should have just said “panther,” or something else inconspicuous.

‘I _knew _there was something shady about you!’ Nott said, her voice a mixture of horror and triumph. ‘Like how you’re so cold!’

Beau frowned, and put a hand to her skin. She didn’t think she was  _that_ cold.

‘No, I mean cold here.’ The goblin pointed towards Beau’s heart. As though they hadn’t literally _just _met.

Beau opened her mouth to shoot back an insult, but she was beaten to the punch by Jester. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ Jester said, reproachfully. 

‘It wasn’t very nice of the Lionetts to slaughter hundreds of innocent people, either,’ Nott pointed out. Beau shrugged.

‘They don’t look too kindly on me,’ she said, which was probably the closest thing to the truth that she’d said all night. In fact, they’d probably be pissed she was using the Lionett name at all. Or not, she remembered, because then they could track her down. Shit, she probably shouldn’t have pretended to be a lion. ‘Since I left, and all. In fact, I think they’d prefer it if I were dead.’

‘Oh, well that’s okay then.’ Nott settled back into her flask. The goblin told them she was a were-rat, which seemed believable enough – Beau had read a lot of sordid tales about were-rats, and people not taking them seriously – but there was something in her voice that put a sliver of doubt in there for Beau.

She wasn’t entirely concerned by it. After all, of all the group, she was probably keeping the biggest secret. The secret that, if it came out, would probably cause them to ditch her on the side of the road. Shifters and non-shifters didn’t really tend to mix all that well. Something about mass slaughter (on both sides). If the goblin was actually a were-ostrich, then who was she to judge?

‘You two have been pretty quiet,’ Molly said, looking at both Fjord and Caleb. ‘Either of you have a dirty secret you don’t want to share with the rest of the group?’

Caleb shrugged. ‘I am actually more of an uh...standard shapeshifter, than a were, but I can...I can turn into a cat.’

Beau stared at him. ‘What, like a big cat?’

‘_Nein_,’ he said. ‘_Nein_. Just a regular cat.’

From the way he held himself, Beau had been expecting something a lot shadier. She supposed he could be lying, but it didn’t sound like it. Either way, Fjord’s revelation undercut any tension that might have built up.

‘I’m an otter,’ he said, a little abashed. Molly choked on his drink.

‘Are you telling me your shifter type, or your gay category?’ Beau couldn’t help but laugh, though she stopped pretty quickly at the look on Fjord’s face. Beau didn’t think that Molly had meant anything by it, but it was admittedly kind of a shitty thing to say. She knew enough to know that judging someone’s shifting form was very much frowned upon. Not that she didn’t do it enough already.

‘Don’t listen to him, Fjord,’ Jester said, in a comforting sort of voice. ‘Otters can be _super_ dangerous. They have really strong teeth, and their bites hurt a _lot_. Plus, they can hold their breath for a really long time. Longer than a snow leopard, I bet.’ Fjord looked a little mollified, but that was probably less about the otter facts, and more about the fact that Jester had so quickly jumped to his defense. In any case, he looked a little less murderous.

Even still, Fjord was a little subdued as they whiled away the afternoon. Molly and Yasha (Beau snuck an extra long look when she thought no-one was watching) returned to finish  packing up the  circus .

Beau kept an eye out for anyone suspicious coming into town, but no-one did. She’d changed both her hair and her clothes since leaving Zadash; her hair was now shaved right down to the scalp, and she’d taken the clothes that Zeenoth had given, and traded them for something that was somehow both more and less conspicuous. The assassins would be looking for someone dressed plainly, traveling alone.

_Ugh._

The next day, she packed up her back with her meager belongings, and met the group at the edge of town.

‘So you’re joining us?’ Jester asked, excitedly, bouncing on the heels of her feet.

‘Don’t make me regret it,’ Beau said.


	3. Three

Three

Full moon was  a week away.

Just as much as any shifter, Beau had kept very detailed track of exactly when the moon was doing what, and the sorts of things she could expect from her family during those times.

For years now, they’d occasionally sent people to the Valley Archive, to either try to kill her, or to bring her back. It was weird; they’d failed so many times, and yet hadn’t made anything more than cursory attempts. It wasn’t until...wasn’t until  now that they’d actually put in an effort.

It was very disconcerting. Clearly something had happened in Kamordah that shifted the scales, but Beau’s chances of finding out what were about the same as her chances of being able to hold a conversation with Yasha without stuttering.

Beau was a little surprised that Yasha and Molly would be traveling with them. Fjord had told her, after all, that they were both members of the circus, but so strong was Molly’s faith in the fate of all things, he had managed to convince Yasha that they absolutely needed to travel with a motley crew of shapeshifters. He had redeemed himself a little in Beau’s eyes, but she still hated him. Maybe it was the way he kept poking her in the side, trying to provoke a response.

‘What about now?’ he asked, in that stupid voice of his. ‘You ready to slaughter all of us yet?’

‘Maybe just you,’ Beau grumbled, and moved ahead so that she was walking with Jester and Fjord instead. 

They had spent a long time on the outskirts of Trostenwald, deciding where to go next.

Caleb and Nott didn’t particularly want to go west, and Beau appreciated that they had been the ones to bring it up, rather than her. They weren’t too fond of east, or north either.

‘I would really appreciate,’ Beau said. ‘Not going anywhere fucking near Zadash.’ Or Kamordah, or Deastock. Really anywhere away from central Empire territory would be great. ‘How do people feel about Vasselheim?’ she asked, only half joking.

‘What the fuck is a Vasselheim?’ Nott wondered, drawing a mildly horrified look from both Beau and Fjord. _Who the fuck didn’t know what Vasselheim was?_

‘It’s the capital of human civilization,’ Beau said, trying very much not to sound like all those condescending asshole monks that had trained her in the art of research. ‘It’s like...the biggest city in the world.’

‘Arcane magic is frowned upon there,’ Caleb pointed out, as if Beau had really been considering it. ‘Myself, and Fjord, and Nott...we would not be looked upon favorably.’

‘Ah, well, worth a shot,’ Beau shrugged. Personally, she felt that it would be easiest to hide from her family in a city that size. Not to mention the fact that no arcane magic meant that her family couldn’t pull some of their more unsavory tricks.

‘I have always wanted to go to Vasselheim,’ Yasha commented. Beau stared at her. It was the first thing that Yasha had said since they left Trostenwald, preferring to stand bank and listen, rather than talk. ‘The Stormlord has a vast temple there, where worshipers train and meditate.’ She gave Beau a look. ‘I have heard that many monks train there as well.’

Beau was a little taken aback by Yasha engaging her so directly, and she stumbled a little over her next words. ‘Well, how about I, uh, take you there one day, huh?’ She followed it up with a wink that was a bit more like a blink, and was vaguely aware of Mollymauk snorting behind her. ‘Oh, fuck off, Molly.’

‘I would like that,’ Yasha said. She was smiling. It was the first time Beau had ever seen her smile, and it seemed to light up her whole face. Gone was the quiet, angry barbarian, and left in its wake was a quiet, shy woman that seemed to have a multitude of complex emotions behind her rage. Beau was utterly intrigued.

‘Lion versus bear,’ Molly commented. ‘I would _love _to see that.’ Beau froze, and she was entirely sure that Yasha did, too. Beau recovered slightly more quickly, rolling her eyes and making a noise of disgust. Beau’s supply of pheromones was running a little low, and she would have to pick some up the next time she managed to get away from the group. Yesterday, she’d accidentally spilled some when getting dressed in the morning, and she’d gotten funny looks from Yasha all day.

She was a little surprised – and a little upset – that Yasha left them the next day. There were storm clouds brewing in the distance, and Beau watched as Yasha stood at the top of a nearby hill, sword planted in the ground, and spoke with her god. At least, that’s what Beau assumed she was doing. Judging by the lightning that cracked through the air, far removed from the rest of the storm, and pulsed through Yasha’s sword, it was a fair bet.

‘I will return when I have fulfilled my duty,’ she said, bidding farewell to the group. She hugged Molly, and Beau could have sworn that her gaze lingered a little too long on Beau. Or maybe that was just what Beau wanted to think.

In any case, she made her own plans to leave not long after; she absolutely could not be anywhere near the group during the full moon. It would be a dead giveaway if they all stripped off their clothes to run into the woods, and she...didn’t.

It would be just as much of a giveaway if she left the day before the full moon, and came back the day after, especially if it became a habit. So, four days before the full moon, Beau packed her bag, and readied her staff.

‘I have to go,’ she told the group over breakfast. ‘There are some things that I have to take care of.’ She didn’t think it would be that much of a problem; after all, Yasha had already up and left them, to go do things for the Stormlord. It was a good excuse, and Beau wished she’d been able to think of one like it. Maybe while she was away she’d be able to think of a better one. Like…checking in with her parole officer. That one would be easy enough to believe.

‘Oh, is it like your monk order calling you back to do training?’ Jester asked.

_ Oh, shit _ . That was a  _ really  _ good one.

‘Yeah,’ Beau grunted. ‘My trainer wants to meet up and do...training.’ It was a shitty lie, and she was sure that they saw right through it, but if they did, they didn’t say anything. Beau wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

In any case, Beau spent the night of the full moon in the tiny tavern of a small town not too far from Felderwin. She  _wished_ she actually had a trainer. Someone that was removed from all of this that could provide some sort of guidance. Someone who didn’t give a shit whether she was a were-lion, or a were-otter, or any of those things.

As luck would have it, fate was listening in.  Stupid fucking Mollymauk and those godsdamned cards.

It was day two of staying in a shitty little in, keeping an eye out for anyone that might be coming after her, that Beau saw the elf. It was a little hard to distinguish facial features, but there weren’t a great deal of full-blooded elves in this part of the world. At least not without reason.

This one was wearing a dark gray hooded cloak, and was going to great pains not to be seen. Or at least not to be seen by anyone that wasn’t Beauregard. Beau, they looked straight in the eye, and nodded.

This didn’t seem like her family’s style. Any assassin sent by her family (and there had been a few of them) wouldn’t have been nearly so blatant. They would have stolen into her room in the middle of the night, and slit her throat. No, whoever this was, they wanted her to know that they were there. A smart person would have run. Beau considered herself a reasonably smart person – certainly one that was more than a bit prone to running away when things got tough – but she was also unasailingly curious. If there was someone sitting at the bar that was interested in her, then fuck you, she wanted to know why.

So, she did what any normal, non-suicidal person would do, and went up to the bar, ordering two whiskeys. She slid one across to the cloaked figure.

The figure pushed back their hood. It was a dark-skinned woman, with long, pointed ears, and a bald head. Certainly no-one that Beau had ever seen before. She took a quick sniff of the whiskey, and downed it in one.

‘You are a hard person to track,’ she said. ‘Your movements are erratic.’ They weren’t wrong. The Mighty Nein had gone south for a while, before heading back up to Alfield, and when Beau had parted ways with the group, she’d traveled East. There certainly wasn’t a pattern to it, which was exactly why she had done it.

‘The question is, why the fuck are you tracking me in the first place?’

The elf did not answer straight away. ‘You were supposed to meet me in Druvenlode,’ she said, finally.  _Oh, shit._ She was fucking Cobalt Soul. ‘Zeenoth was very...concerned that you may have misinterpreted his instructions.’

Beau laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘I am almost certain that he didn’t think that at all. In fact, I’m sure he knows for a fact that I flagrantly disobeyed his instructions, knowing that Druvenlode was the last place that I wanted to be.’

‘For good reason,’ the elf said. ‘I spotted no less than three assassins in the brief time that I was there. Your family are very...insistent on getting what they want.’ There was a pause. ‘My name is Dairon. I am an Expositor of the Cobalt Soul.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ Beau said. It was a complete and utter lie. If someone from the Cobalt Soul could track her down, then she was certain that assassins could as well. Dairon seemed to be reading her mind.

‘The fact that you were to travel to Druvenlode was a secret that was not particularly well kept,’ she said. ‘Your presence here; I believe I am right in thinking that the only two people that are aware of it are sitting at this bar.’

‘I’m not going with you,’ Beau said, bluntly. Dairon laughed.

‘I would not expect you to,’ they said. ‘But that does not preclude the need for you to be better equipped to deal with these...assassins.’ She didn’t ask why the assassins were on Beau’s trail, and in all honesty, she had no doubt been fully briefed by Zeenoth.

Beau didn’t know why she didn’t just pack up and leave straight then and there. Perhaps it was the same instinct that had told her to travel with the Mighty Nein. If Dairon wanted to kill her...well, there would have been easier ways to do it.

So they went to an abandoned warehouse, and Beau got the crap kicked out of her, and she almost landed a couple of submissions on Dairon, but the elf was way, way more experienced than her.

As they parted ways, Dairon gave Beau a small rock the size of an apple. ‘Use this to contact me,’ they said. ‘Keep in mind, they will not stop looking for you. Be patient. Don’t get too attached, and...’ She paused. ‘Stay alive.’

…

Two days after that, Beau was woken up by a message in her head.

‘_Heey, Beau, it’s Jester, just wondering if you’ve finished your training yet, anyway, if you want to meet in Trostenwald again, we were thinking of—_’

Exactly what the Mighty Nein was thinking of, Beau didn’t know, but they were far enough out from the full moon that it would be safe to see them again. Next time it came around, she supposed she would have to think of another excuse to be somewhere else. The trainer one seemed to work okay, and it was only half a lie now that she actually did have a trainer.

When she met the Mighty Nein once more in the Nestled Nook Inn, Yasha was with them. She looked worn, and tired, and just as attractive as the first time that Beau had laid eyes on her.

‘How was your training?’ Nott asked. Her yellow eyes were narrowed in suspicion.

‘It was fucking dope,’ Beau said. It wasn’t a lie. ‘My trainer beat the shit out of me.’ She tilted her head to show Nott the still healing bruise across her jaw. Last she’d looked in the mirror, it had been the color of rotten apples. It hurt like a bitch. Nott flicked it. ‘Fucking ow! What was that for?’

‘I’m just surprised you’re still bruised is all. Whenever I get bruised it goes away in a couple of hours.’

Oh shit.

She’d forgotten. Fucking shifter healing.

‘Yeah, well, two days ago it was broken, so this is progress,’ Beau muttered. Thankfully, she’d managed to pick up some more pheromones on her way back to Trostenwald. She wasn’t sure if they were something she’d be able to pick up beyond the Wuyun Gates. There were half a dozen vials of the stuff in the bottom of her pack.

That night Beau had a very long, very hot bath. She toweled herself off, wincing at the pull on her still-healing wounds.

If she was going to keep this charade up, she’d either need to stop getting hurt without a cleric around, or invest in a shitton of healing potions. Neither was a particularly practical option.

She toweled herself off and returned to the room that she shared with Jester.

There was someone else already there. A green-skinned, yellow-eyed someone.

Nott was going through Beau’s bag.

The goblin started at the sound of the door, opening, eyes wide when she saw Beau. They both looked to the vial in Nott’s left hand.

‘Nott, what the fuck—’

Vial in hand, Nott ran.


	4. Four

Four

Beau ran.

The goblin was fast, but she was faster. She had been running away from things her whole fucking life, so it was kind of ridiculous that she was running towards them now.

Nott ran into the room that she shared with Caleb, not quite fast enough to avoid the arm coming down to grab her. Beau slammed Nott into the wall.

‘Give it back,’ she snarled. 

There was a beat of silence. Then, Beau heard the scrape of a foot against the wooden floor. She didn’t dare turn around, but could feel the heat of flames close to her neck.

‘If I were you, I would put her down, _ja_?’ said Caleb.

‘I’ll put her down as soon as she gives back what she stole from my backpack.’

Caleb sighed, apparently not surprised. ‘Nott, we have talked about this, have we not? We do not steal from our friends.’ Beau was a little intrigued by the declaration. It was interesting; of the group, Caleb and Nott were just as insular as she was, if not more so. In fact, she wasn’t really sure why they even hung around. Perhaps it was for the same reason that she did; using the rest of the group as a disguise. ‘Beauregard will let you go, and you will return what you stole.’

‘I’m not letting anything go,’ Beau said, turning to address Caleb. Rookie mistake. Nott took advantage of her distraction, and wriggled free. Beau made to run after her again, but to her surprise, the goblin didn’t run. She (a little sheepishly) handed over the vial of yellow liquid. Beau pocketed it.

‘Is that something that we need to be worried about?’ he asked. Beau frowned. She remembered, suddenly, that like her, he was a bit different from the rest of the group. A regular shapeshifter, rather than a were. It meant that he was not enslaved to the whims of the lunar cycle. It also meant that his senses were not quite as keen as the rest of the group.

Beau shared a look with Nott, who had clearly managed to ascertain what the substance was in the few brief moments it had been in her hand. 

‘I don’t know,’ Beau said, not tearing her gaze away from Nott. ‘Is it something that I need to worry about?’

Caleb, for his part, looked very confused. ‘I believe I might be missing something, here. What I mean to say is...you are not drawing untoward attention by dealing drugs, or messing with things that you do not understand.’ Beau felt a little affronted by that second part. She knew he was much smarter than she was, but he didn’t have to rub it in.

Beau paused. ‘It’s not something that...I would consciously let hurt the group,’ she said, finally. It wasn’t a particularly good explanation, but it was difficult to explain the reasons why assassins were after her. If she was going to tell the story, she would have to tell the whole story.

Caleb seemed to sense her hesitation.

More than that, Beau realized. It was only when she choked back a sob that she realized she was crying.

‘If it is something that you would rather not discuss, I understand. If it is something where you do not trust us, then...Let me assure you, I can be very discreet.’ Beau could hardly fail to notice that he hadn’t include Nott in that assessment. But then, Nott had already figured it out, so there was little point in keeping it from her.

Beau went to the door, and looked out onto the landing. There was no-one there, but that didn’t mean anything, when they were traveling with a bunch of people with super-hearing.

‘Here,’ Caleb said. He clicked his fingers and summoned his cat familiar, Frumpkin to his shoulders. ‘Frumpkin will make sure no-one is listening in.’ Beau bit back a slight smirk. She found it kind of hilarious that a wizard that could turn into a cat at will also had a cat familiar. Talk about brand consistency. Frumpkin jumped down from Caleb’s shoulders, and went to patrol the hallway.

‘I mean,’ Beau started. ‘I’m basically going to tell you the biggest secret I have in the world, so...’ she trailed off, letting him put two and two together.

‘You want a, uh...a secret for a secret,’ he said.

‘Sounds fair, right?’

Caleb hesitated. It was a very long hesitation. Much longer than either of them had hesitated at any point during the conversation so far. ‘Alright,’ he said, finally. ‘In that case, I would also need a promise of your own discretion.’

‘Sure,’ Beau said, in an off-hand sort of voice. If there was one thing she was actually pretty fucking good at, it was keeping secrets.

‘So you will tell me what you are hiding?’

_Well, not everything_ .

‘You can tell him what they are,’ Beau said, jerking her head at Nott as she tapped her pocket. ‘You’ve figured it out.’

‘They’re were-cat pheromones!’ Nott said, triumphantly. ‘Not very well synthesized, to be honest, but pheromones are very difficult to collect.’ She frowned, as though suddenly realizing the gravity of the words. ‘Wait, you’re not even a Lionett? I was mean to you for nothing?’

‘No, I am a Lionett,’ Beau said. ‘I’m just not...not a shifter,’ she admitted. It was a hard thing to admit, and she was very aware that her eyes were still wet with tears. She was half expecting them to look at her in disgust, in fear, for having lied to them. Instead, she only saw pity, which was somehow worse. ‘I’m trying to hide from them, so if they’re looking for a human, they’re not going to look in a group of shifters.’

‘Makes sense,’ Nott agreed. Caleb said nothing, but he had a shrewd sort of look on his face.

‘They are...they want to kill you because you are not a were-lion?’

‘Among other reasons,’ Beau said. ‘It’s a long story, and that wasn’t part of the deal. So now it’s your turn.’

Caleb looked suddenly pale. ‘This is, uh...something that I have not even told Nott. The two of you will be the only people in the world who know the truth of how Caleb Widogast came to be.’ There was a pause, and he took a deep breath. ‘I am going to tell you the story of how I murdered my mother and father.’

…

Holy shit.

Beau had sort of edged her toe over the line, setting the tone of the conversation, and then Caleb had just gone ahead and obliterated the line. She now knew more about him that she had ever wanted to know.

Beau wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve, but in a way, it had taken the pressure off her own confession. Nott didn’t care that she’d been lying to them, because she was too busy trying to comfort Caleb.

Somehow, she felt like she was intruding, even though it was her own story that had put this into motion. It struck her that their stories were very similar, even if he didn’t know all of hers; on the run from a powerful person that would sooner kill her than let her go free. Burdened with the memories of all the things that had happened.

Beau rubbed at a scar that ran across the side of her neck, peeking out from the edge of her robes. There were a couple of dozen more scars besides, and they all sort of tingled with the knowledge that maybe she wasn’t alone.

It was a sobering thought. For all the time she had spent at the Cobalt Soul, there had never been anyone she had considered herself to be close to. She had never wanted to get close to anyone, for fear of dragging them into her battles.

The thought that maybe she had friends that would _help_ her...that was a very strange concept.

‘You know,’ Caleb said, after a very long while. ‘I do not think the others would be upset if you told them. It is not anything to be ashamed of.’

Beau could have told him exactly the same thing, but chose not to.

‘It’s not about being ashamed,’ she told him. It was probably only half a lie. ‘It’s about...minimizing the number of people who know; if they manage to track me down, then I’m not the only one in danger.’

‘Then it is in both of our best interests to...keep a low profile, _ja_?’

Beau snorted. In a group that included Jester, Molly and Yasha, it seemed difficult to keep a low profile. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

…

The next morning at breakfast, Beau was greeting with a mug of ale, and a plate of breakfast.

She’d been a little hesitant about coming down, as though she’d only come to down to be greeted by a group of accusatory faces, telling her to leave and never come back.

Instead, she came down to Jester trying to see just how many forks she could fit into the chains of Molly’s jewelry. They got to fifteen, before the whole thing sort of collapsed, and Adelaine, the Barmaid, gave them a reproachful sort of look. Molly examined his reflecting in the back of a metal plate, a fork still hanging from one of his horns. ‘You know, I kind of dig it,’ he said, smirking. ‘I may have to find a silversmith.’

‘Those are for you,’ Molly said, indicating the ale, and the plate of meats. Beau frowned, as she sat down at the table. ‘Nott and Caleb said you were really hungry.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Beau took a long sip of the ale. It was a little bit warm; she’d spent a long time debating whether or not to come downstairs. ‘And where are they?’

‘Off looking for _books, _of course,’ Jester said. She was munching on a pastry that did not appear to have come from the kitchens of the _Nestled Nook Inn_. ‘I don’t know why they bother when there’s no smut.’

‘Why are you so important that they bought you breakfast?’ Molly asked, leaning in far too close for Beau’s liking.

‘Because I’m not a nosy asshole,’ Beau muttered. Molly got the hint, but still looked at her suspiciously as she ate her bread and pork belly. She’d been very careful when applying the pheromones this morning, not particularly wanting a repeat of the previous evening. Two people knowing was bad enough.

They packed up their things and headed south. Beau kept to the back of the group, keeping both a watchful eye and a watchful ear out for anyone following them. She started slightly as Frumpkin darted back to join her. Walking closer to the front with Nott, she doubted that the wizard was actually piloting his familiar, but she appreciated the gesture just the same.

They traveled slowly south, keeping off the roads at Beau’s request. She was entirely certain that the request was a suspicious one, but as long as they just expected her to be on the run from someone, they might not consider the other thing.

They camped north of the Wuyun Gates. Beau kept a little bit of distance from the rest of the group. For some strange reason, she was thinking about one of the things that Dairon had told her.

_Don’t get too attached._

Beau watched as Jester accepted a bowl of cured meats and some sort of root vegetable from Fjord, who was, as it turned out, a surprisingly good cook. Apparently he’d had to do a decent amount of it when he’d been out on the ocean. Or when he’d been in the orphanage. His childhood sounded almost as shitty as hers.

She zoned out for a while, staring up at the stars, which were much, much clearer this far from any major towns or cities. As a child, she could remember those sleepless nights in the mountains, or in the forest, taking a five minute breather while trying to be as quiet as possible. On those nights, the moon was so bright that the stars were a little dimmer, but even still, they made her think about how one day, she would be very, very far away.

‘Can I sit?’ said a voice, directly to Beau’s left. Beau jumped, and swore very loudly. So much for keeping a lookout. ‘I’m sorry,’ Yasha said, sounding a little sheepish. ‘I did not mean to startle you. I brought you some food.’ She handed Beau a bowl of the same cured meats and root vegetables. Beau couldn’t tell what the vegetables were. Definitely not something that they grew in Kamordah.

‘Thanks,’ Beau said, accepting the bowl. Though there was plenty of space on the log she was sitting on, she moved aside to give Yasha space; a non-verbal invitation.

‘You have been very quiet these last few days,’ Yasha said. Beau bit back a laugh. If _Yasha_ of all people was telling her she was quiet… ‘Is everything okay?’

Beau didn’t know how to respond. She was sort of maybe figuring out that not once in her life had things ever been “okay.” That now, after so fucking long, she was getting the first idea of what it was like to maybe even start to be okay.

For the first time in her life, she had friends, some of whom knew her secret.

She didn’t want to lose that.

‘Yeah,’ Beau said, smiling. ‘Everything is fine.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: "Oh, hey, if Beau doesn't want to go north, and Caleb doesn't want to go north, then they'll all go south instead, and no-one gets kidnapped, and no-one dies, that's pretty cool"  
Me: *remembers the few thousand words written with both Molly and Caduceus, who lives in the north* FUCK.
> 
> \--  
A couple of random things. Caleb probably took a couple of levels in druid so he could turn into a cat. Beau has proficiency in survival for reasons that will become evident later.


	5. Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some very minor Beau/OC in this chapter.

Five

Beau was a little surprised when they made it through the Wuyun Gates without too much issue.

Funnily, the one that stood the worst chance of being caught for something was her. It wasn’t illegal in the Empire to be a shapeshifter, the same way it wasn’t illegal to be a wizard, or a cleric, or a warlock. They probably would have said something if the Nein had rocked up to the Gates in full were form, though there was an even chance that they might have also just run away screaming. Beau hadn’t seen the rest of them in were form, but Yasha alone was enough to make any guard shit their pants in fear.

So, the guards didn’t realize that six shapeshifters, and a monk pretending to be a shapeshifter traveled south to the Menagerie Coast. They didn’t find the vials of were-cat pheromones hiding at the bottom of her bag. Best of all, they didn’t draw their crossbows when Nott screamed “look, a pterodactyl” as they searched the cart.

Small favors.

As they drew closer to Nicodranas (Jester wanting desperately to visit her mother), they discussed their next steps.

Fjord was very keen on finding passage on a ship, for reasons that he would not disclose to them. He had clearly not thought very hard about all the flaws in that plan.

‘Think about how the full moon’s gonna go on a boat. I dunno about you guys, but I like some space to...you know, stretch out when I shift. I don’t think we’re gonna get that on a boat.’ Beau was frankly, more concerned about the fact that, if a full moon came around while they were out at sea, it would be very, very difficult to hide the fact that she didn’t shift.

Fjord frowned. ‘I...’ he started. ‘I guess we always dropped anchor at full moon, and I just swum around in the water.’

‘Well lions are fucking terrible swimmers.’ That much, at least, she knew. When she was twelve, or so, she realized that it was easier to get away from them if she crossed the wide river north-east of Kamordah, and lost herself in the mountains. After the full moon, they would always find her, and drag her back, kicking and screaming. The punishment was always worse those months. ‘So unless you want me to eat the crew, I don’t think getting stuck on a boat is a good idea.’

Beau was a little surprised that the rest of the group backed her up. Nott, she expected, because Nott had made it abundantly clear that she was terrified of being on the water, but Jester at least, had looked really excited about the prospect of becoming pirates. Beau had to admit, she was a little disappointed too; being a pirate sounded fucking _cool_.

‘I suppose we could head west, after,’ Fjord suggested. ‘To Port Damali.’ Beau didn’t care either way what was in Port Damali. All she cared about was that they weren’t going back _north_. That was the important thing. This far away, it would be much harder for anyone from Kamordah to find her.

They had been in Nicodranas for a couple of days when Beau readied herself to leave the group again. This time, though, she was saved the trouble of thinking up an excuse by Caleb, who insisted that he needed to visit the Cobalt Soul in Port Damali, and would she please take him there.

‘Sure,’ Beau said, eyeing him a little suspiciously. Normally, she would have asked for something in return to take him to the Cobalt Soul library, but technically, he was doing _her_ the favor.

‘We will need to leave immediately, of course. I would not wish to drag the rest of the group away from a, uh...happy family reunion.’

‘Let’s do it,’ Beau said, evenly. She was almost glad to get away from the _Lavish Chateau_. She had not failed to notice the suspicious looks of Jester’s mother, who almost definitely didn’t believe that Beau was a were-lion, and was keen to avoid the confrontation.

Beau was a little surprised that Nott didn’t join them, before remembering that she, too, would need somewhere to shift for the upcoming full-moon. Not that a were-rat needed as much space to shift as a lion, or a bear. Beau was still a little suspicious on that front herself; the night she and Caleb had told their secrets, Nott had remained pretty tight-lipped.

Beau would have been willing to bet her life on the fact that there was definitely a secret there. To the point where she’d stake going back to Kamordah on her not being wrong.

The problem with asking questions so outright, though, was the fact that you opened yourself up to questions coming right back at you. Beau wasn’t quite ready to reveal more of her cards than she already had, so instead she just...just watched. Not just Nott, but the rest of them, too. There were definitely secrets there that Beau wanted to figure out. The better she knew them, the better she’d be able to figure out which one of them might end up stabbing her in the back.

Even money was on Molly, but it was early days yet. Even Jester could turn out to be an evil witch in disguise.

‘Be safe,’ Yasha said, as they left, looking Beau directly in the eyes. It was a little weird, Beau thought. She was beginning to get the distinct impression that there was something else behind the glances. Not like...feelings or anything, just...something else.

‘So do you actually want me to take you to the library?’ Beau asked, once they’d set out on their journey. It was both faster, and slower with just the two of them. They didn’t have to wait for anyone to catch up, but conversely, it was more important that they keep an eye out for any danger in their path.

‘Of course,’ Caleb said. ‘There was no lie. I would like to use the library, and as you are the only member of the Cobalt Soul that I know, I need your assistance to do so. If it happens to coincide with the full moon then that is a, ah...happy coincidence.’

‘Right.’ Beau rolled her eyes. They continued on in silence, spending the night of the full moon in Port Zoon. Beau drank heavily, and could have sworn she heard the sounds of howling in the distance.

‘You get many wolves this far south?’ she asked the bartender, a tall, hall-elven man with a scarred face, and a pierced ear. He looked at her curiously.

‘Not many wolves, no. But it is full moon, so...’ He shrugged. Right, Beau remembered. Full moon. Duh. After all, it wasn’t as though the Mighty Nein were the only shapeshifters in Wildemount.

‘You are worried,’ Caleb said. It wasn’t a question.

Of course she was worried.

‘You know, it is easier to watch your back when there are other people watching it with you,’ he commented.

‘We’ve been over this,’ Beau said, shortly. She had already told him why she didn’t want the rest of the group to know. She was also starting to consider that he was more than likely projecting his own desires onto her. Playing Caleb Widogast’s conscience was not a cluster-fuck that Beau wanted to get into.

‘I cannot visit the library all the time,’ he told her. ‘One day you will not have an excuse not to be there, and they will find out whether you want them to or not.’

‘Caleb,’ Beau said. Her patience was wearing thin. ‘Fuck off.’ He gave her a knowing sort of look, before retiring to his room to read. Beau went to the bartender again.

‘Do you happen to have some form of, uh...companionship that I could hire?’

‘No companionship,’ he said, apologetically, ‘But there’s an elven woman over there that’s been eyeing you all night.’ Beau half expected to see Dairon when she turned around, but was relieved to see a _very _attractive elf who winked as soon as they made eye contact.

‘Give me two of whatever she’s been drinking,’ Beau said, and flipped the bartender a gold coin. He poured two glasses of a reasonable quality whiskey. Beau raised an eyebrow. A woman of good taste, clearly.

The elf had bright, merry looking eyes, and was wearing a shining armor that might have been mythril. There were two swords sheathed at her hip. Beau set down the drink in front of her.

‘Cheers.’ The elf grinned.

‘Let’s not beat around the bush,’ Beau said. ‘You wanna come upstairs and blow off some steam?’ The elf downed the shot. She took Beau by the chin, and pulled her in for a kiss.

They went upstairs.

…

The next morning, Caleb looked mildly irritated. In hindsight, Beau wondered if she had made too much noise the previous evening. Then, she decided that she didn’t care.

The elf – Ayla – left her room after a very enjoyable, and very cathartic evening, and Beau was only limping a little bit.

‘You know,’ Caleb said, without looking up from his spellbook. ‘Hooking up with a stranger is perhaps not the best way to stay under the eagle’s eye.’ Beau ignored him. She figured they were even, given she was taking him to the library.

It was another day and a half’s journey to Port Damali, and the Archivists there were a little surprised to see her. Thankfully, one of her Trainers in Zadash was conducting research there. Beau tried to ignore the way he sighed when he saw her; she hadn’t exactly made life easy for any of her trainers.

Even still, he was willing to put in a few hours to train her, which was really more than she deserved. After she finished, bleeding, bruised and broken, she returned to the library to find Caleb neck deep in books about advanced Transmutation.

‘_Schei__ß__e_,’ he said, on seeing her face. ‘You look like you got into a fight with an ogre.’

It wasn’t an entirely unfair comparison. The trainer – Bor – was an enormous Goliath, and he had more power in his little finger than she did in her entire body. He had well and truly schooled her.

‘Ah, this is nothing,’ Beau said, slightly horrified when she watched Caleb’s brow furrow at her words.

‘Nothing compared to what?’ he asked. Beau shook her head. She wasn’t going to answer that one. He’d gotten the one answer that he’d earned. She wasn’t going to give him the next one for free.

They stayed in Port Damali for two days before starting the trek back to Nicodranas. It wasn’t a long trek by any means, but the longer that they stayed away from the group, the antsier Beau got. She was much more noticeable traveling with only one other person, and she had also just spent two days at the Cobalt Soul.

On the morning of the second day, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she was packing up her bedroll. ‘I think someone might be following us,’ she whispered to Caleb. He nodded, and without even a moment’s hesitation, he muttered a few words, and with a wave of his hands, she was invisible. The second after that, he had turned himself into a cat, and darted behind a nearby tree.

Unfortunately, being invisible couldn’t help her scent. If they’d sent the wolves, she was dead, but if they’d sent the hounds...

Nothing happened.

Beau waited for something to happen, but nothing happened. If there was something that was following them, it was keeping its distance.

Somehow, they made it back to Nicodranas without any issue, save getting on each other’s nerves. Beau was even glad to see Molly, who wasted no time in insulting her, asking if she’d eaten any antelopes on her journey west. She gave him the finger.

‘It’s so good to see you Beau!’ Jester said, excitedly, she ran towards Beau with no warning, and wrapped her in a tight hug. Beau was a little startled; she hadn’t realized the tiefling would have missed her so much.

‘It’s been like...five days,’ Beau said, frowning. ‘I’ve been gone that long before.’

‘I just like to know you’re safe,’ Jester said, shrugging. Beau frowned. She’d never really had anyone in her life that cared so much.

They set off the next morning, Marion Lavorre wishing them all good luck. She was a little less stand-offish with Beau than she had been when they first met, which was something.

‘So tell me _all_ about Port Damali,’ Jester was saying, even as they walked west. It struck Beau suddenly that maybe they could have just stayed in Port Damali, given that they were headed back that way anyway.

They slept a little way off the road, using trees and boulders for cover. Beau tried not to moan too much when Fjord shook her awake for final watch.

Beau wiped sleep from her eyes, and moved to sit near the dying flames of the fire. It wasn’t even that cool a night, and in hindsight, it probably made them much easier to track, but it gave a strange sort of security, given that Beau couldn’t see in the dark.

At least she wasn’t on watch alone. Yasha was much less grumpy at being woken in the early hours of the morning, and didn’t seem nearly as bleary-eyed. She was quiet, though, and stared at the tiny sparks of ember that jumped from tiny flames. Another hour or so, and it would be completely out.

‘This must be pretty different from Xhorhas, huh?’ Beau commented, before she even realized she was doing it.

Yasha didn’t answer straight away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is very different.’

‘Which part of Xhorhas are you from?’

Again, another pause. ‘I am from the south of Xhorhas. A place called the Iothia Moorlands. I lived there with my...tribe, but...I can never go back.’

Beau opened her mouth to ask why, but she stopped. Just over the crackle of the fire, she could hear something moving in the distance.

‘Shh,’ she whispered to Yasha. ‘I think I heard something.’ Beau got to her feet, and started edging towards the forest, hand on her staff.

When she was still about a hundred feet away, the world seemed to come into sharper focus. Emerging from the forest was a ghostly looking hound, with eerie green eyes.

It was staring straight at her.


	6. Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A decent amount of violence, and a decent amount of darkness and implied/referenced child abuse. Like, for real, Beau's parents are the worst.

Six

For a brief moment, neither Beau nor the hound moved. She wanted to run, but her feet felt as though they were stuck fast to the ground, keeping her there.

If there was one hound, there would be more, and sure enough, there was a loud growling sort of noise, and two more of the hounds emerged from the forest behind the first.

‘Is there something there?’ came Yasha’s voice from behind her, and Beau jumped. For half a second, she’d forgotten Yasha was there.

Beau ran.

Not away, towards the group, but towards the hounds. If she managed to get rid of them, they wouldn’t be able to get word back to whoever had sent them.

She gets in one good strike on the first hound – straight to the snout with her staff, sending it reeling – before the other two close in on her. Enormous teeth closed around her midsection, tearing away skin and cloth. The hound shook her roughly before sending her sprawling to the ground. Before she could even think about getting up, Yasha was there, enormous greatsword drawn. With a single, furious strike, she cleaved the first hound in two, or at least would have if it had been corporeal. Instead, it vanished into a whisper of green smoke.

Emboldened by the death of the first hound, Beau jumped to her feet, wincing at the pain that rippled across her body. She just barely felt the warm heat, saw the bright glow as a _Fire Bolt_ ripped one of the remaining hounds. A crossbow bolt struck one of them in the flank. A giant lollipop hovered in the air.

The rest of the Mighty Nein had arrived.

The hounds died quickly then, but Beau did not let her vigilance waver. She ran back to the campsite, and began stamping out the fire with her bare feet. She was so pumped with adrenaline that she didn’t begin to feel the pain until there were nothing but glowing embers.

‘We need to move, _now_,’ she said, vaguely aware that 

‘Beau, what—’

‘Those hounds were sent by my family, which means they know where I am, which means _they’ll_ be here soon, which means we need to leave _now_.’ The others didn’t argue, but nor did they move with nearly the urgency she would have liked. Jester had just barely finished shoving her bedroll back into her bag, when there was a distant roar.

‘Fucking go!’ Beau yelled. She didn’t wait to check if the rest of the group were following her. She didn’t even bother to get her own bag. She just ran.

She ran like she was a teenager again, and they were on one of their monthly hunts, and the only thing on her mind was getting as far away as possible, because the longer it took them to find her, then maybe the less they’d be able to do to her. Somehow it never quite worked out that way.  They would laugh and cheer when they found her cowering in the top branches of a tree, and shake the boughs until she came down, or...once, they’d had a muttered, laughing conversation, and then just set the tree on fire. There was a large burn scar across her back from that one.

This time, though, she had a dog bite on her stomach, and blood dripping from her as she ran. Even if she managed to outrun them – she never did – they’d easily be able to track her by scent.

She stopped.

She’d run far enough that the Mighty Nein were far away, and that was some small favor. She didn’t want them to get torn apart by wolves. Whether or not that had been in her mind when she’d run, she didn’t know.

There were  four wolves – lackeys – only a couple of whom she recognized. They were in a half-shifted form, which somehow made them look more monstrous than if they’d just been plain fucking wolves.

‘Beauregard,’ the lead wolf hissed. It was creepy. Wolves weren’t supposed to hiss. The fact that werewolves orders from her parents was bad enough. The fact that her parents were evil enough that people would rather take orders than disobey was another matter altogether. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’

‘Yeah?’ Beau said, with a breathy sort of laugh. ‘What would it take for you to forget you ever saw me? Or better yet, tell them you saw my corpse floating face down in a river somewhere.’ She didn’t often jump straight to bargaining without even trying shit-talking, but everything fucking _hurt_, and she just wanted it to be over with.

The wolf laughed, and it was worse than the hissing. ‘Nice try,’ he said. ‘They’ll give me a pretty nice reward for your pelt, skinless.’ He raised a long, lethal looking dagger in his hand. The hilt and the pommel were both wrapped in cloth, which made her think that the whole thing was probably made of silver. ‘ Abominations like you are only worth the bounty.’

Beau’s stomach roiled. She readied her staff, glad, suddenly, that she hadn’t left it behind.

She couldn’t let them get to her. She had to fight.

With an unfettered roar that was nothing like the roar of a lion, she ran at them, swinging her staff before she was even half-way there. Her focus narrowed to a pinpoint; the only thing in the world that mattered was the wolf in front of her, threatening to murder her and desecrate her corpse. Beau couldn’t even remember his name. She knew he’d been with the family a long time; one of the worst full moons, she remember his claws raking across her body, tearing her open.

She was older now. Stronger.

She was not going to let them win.

Of course, even if it had been one on one, rather than four on one, they still had the advantage of weight, and claws, and strength. She was a little bit faster, maybe, but that only helped her dodge the first two blows. The third, a heavy swipe with claws, came around to meet her face.

‘Allowed to touch the face now, pretty,’ he snarled. Even though she didn’t have the senses of a lion, she could still smell his disgusting breath.

A freezing cold hand adjusted her collar. _Don’t worry, Beauregard, no-one will ever see your shame._

‘Fuck _you_!’ she spat, kicking him backwards into one of the other wolves. The dagger fell to the ground, and the third wolf picked it up.

He slashed once, and missed. The second time, Beau parried with her staff. The third time, he got skin.

He arced across her already wounded stomach, carving a deep gouge that almost definitely nicked a rib on its way down. Beau gasped in agony, willing her arms to take hold of the staff, to fight back, to do something.

There was nothing. She dropped to her knees, and waited for the killing blow. At least this time it would be quick. At least this time they wouldn’t toy with her; wouldn’t bite her, or scratch her, or...or any of those things.

Death never came.

For the second time that night, Beau saw the _Fire Bolt_, only this time is was blurred, and seemed so very far away. There was shouting, and screaming, and then…

Silence.

‘Beau!’ There was a voice in her ear that sounded like it was coming from a million miles away. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I think so,’ Beau muttered. She was still staring at the ground. Didn’t dare look up, didn’t dare look them in the eye. She was still on her knees, swaying, but upright.

How much had they heard? She was pretty sure she’d been a decent way ahead of the group, but fucking weres had very, very good hearing. She’d learned that lesson the hard way more than once; a boot on the edge of a stick, a rock bouncing down a hill...A loud conversation between six werewolves and a monk was hardly stealthy. A conversation about how she was an abomination.

‘Here, let me heal you,’ Jester was saying, and Beau’s head was spinning so much she couldn’t quite grab hold of the conversation. Jester paused. Frowned. Like something was wrong. ‘Was there poison on the blade?’

‘Don’t touch it!’ Beau yelled, just barely managing to shove Jester out of the way before she picked up the dagger. ‘It’s silver.’ It wasn’t even the whole dagger, she realized; a chunk of it seemed to have broken off in the fight. Then, she remembered that stinging pain, and the blood that throbbed from her abdomen, and realized that the tip of the dagger was still inside of her. She collapsed onto the ground, moaning.

_Oh, shit_ .

‘Beau, we need to get it out,’ Jester said, seriously, clearly realizing at the same time that Beau did. ‘If it stays in there, you’ll die.’ Jester was operating, Beau figured, on the reasonably fair assumption that Beau was a shifter, and that silver would kill her. This seemed like a bad time to come clean.

_Hey Jester, you know how I’ve spent the last couple of months telling you I’m a shapeshifter like everyone else? Well, funny story..._

If it stayed in there, it would probably kill her regardless of whether she was a shifter or not. A chunk of metal in the gut was nothing to shrug at. If she’d been a were-lion, it’d probably just kill her faster.

‘No.’ Beau gritted her teeth; now that she was aware that the metal was inside her, she could almost feel it, grinding against her bones. ‘If you touch it, _you’ll_ die.’ It was an exaggeration, but not by a huge amount. Skin contact with silver didn’t generally kill a shifter unless it was prolonged contact. There was something else there, though; an agonizing pain that spread across her whole body. Her head spun. _What had been on that dagger?_

‘I will take it out,’ Yasha said, kneeling next to Beau. Beau hadn’t even realized she’d been there. The world came into a brief focus, and she realized that they were _all _there, standing around watching her die. ‘Then, Jester can heal us both.’ Beau wanted to argue, but a wave of dizziness overtook her, and the world went white. She was lying on her back, staring up at the snow flurries that drifted lazily past. Gods, she hated the winter. Why had she even agreed to come north with them? She was freezing her tits off, and the whole goddamned snowbank was stained with her blood.

Wait.

No.

She wasn’t in the north.

They were in the south, between Nicodranas and Port Damali.

There was no snow. She hadn’t spent half the night, shivering behind a rock, body shaking from fear and tears as the wolves and the lions hunted for her.  The wet beneath her body was from the blood that was pouring from the wound in her stomach.  The snow flurries were...were ash, from something. Maybe from Caleb’s  _Fire Bolt_ .

The freezing…actually, no. She was definitely freezing. It was a warm night though, so it was probably more to do with the fact that she was about to die.

Someone had put a piece of leather in her mouth, and she bit down on it, hard. Even still, the feeling of Yasha’s hand reaching in to pull out the tip of the dagger was more pain that Beau had felt in a long time. She wanted to thrash, to pull her body away, and it was only then that she realized Jester and Fjord were both holding her down.  Yasha seemed to grit her teeth at the pain.

_Stay still, Beauregard_ , said the voice inside her head. Her mother’s voice.  _It’ll be over soon_ . _ Soon, you’ll be one of us_ .

_ Please, mommy, no. Not again. Please just leave me alon e. I don’t want to be a lion _ .

Beau relaxed her jaw, and the leather fell out. Yasha’s fingers probed a little bit deeper. They felt almost like teeth. She let out a soft sort of groan.

Beau screamed.

Her eyes stared upwards, and the stars above began to slowly blink out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, maybe some Yasha flashbacks/story.


	7. Seven

Seven

Yasha brushed Beau’s hair back from her forehead. It had been over an hour since they had taken the blade out, and healed her, and yet the monk’s body was still wracked with fever, and she was yet to regain consciousness. They had returned to the Lavish Chateau, and were in the midst of discussions about where to go next. It would not take Beau’s family too long to discover that the hounds and the wolves that they had sent to kill her had failed.

It had been three days, and nothing had changed.

Jester had cast a  _Lesser Restoration_ , which should have cleared the poison, should have healed her, and yet…

‘Maybe it is silver poisoning,’ Yasha said. Her own hand was still burned raw from the contact with the silver, even though she had flung it to the ground the moment she’d pulled it from Beau’s body, and Jester had healed it. ‘We may need to detoxify her blood.’ Yasha had seen many cases of silver poisoning, living in the Iothia Moorlands. A rival tribe had found that the easiest way to dispatch a large group of shapeshifters was to use silver.

‘Yasha, sweetie, it’s not silver poisoning,’ Molly said, gently. He had a strange look on his face. Yasha rounded on him, angrily.

‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘She is sweating, and feverish, and was stabbed with a silver knife. How is it not silver poisoning?’

‘Because…’ Molly hesitated.

‘Because she’s not a shapeshifter,’ Nott interjected. Molly gave the goblin a dirty look. Yasha didn’t understand.

‘I...How is she not a shapeshifter?’ Yasha looked around at the rest of the group. None of the rest of them seemed even a little bit surprised at what Nott had said. Was she really the last to know? 

‘Well, you notice that she’s never around during full moon, right?’ Jester offered. ‘And how she puts on those pheromones every day so she’ll smell right. But you know...don’t tell her that we know, or anything, y’know?’

Yasha had thought there was something strange about Beau’s smell – stronger on some days than others, changing bit by bit – but had put it down to her own...feelings. The idea that Beau wasn’t even a shapeshifter – wasn’t even a were-lion was...disconcerting. More disconcerting was the fact that everyone else seemed to know but her.

‘I think…’ Yasha said, slowly. ‘I think I may need to get some rest. Can you please let me know immediately if there are any changes?’

‘Yasha...’ Jester started, and Yasha held up a hand. ‘Please, just...I need to sleep.’

It was not a complete lie. They had rushed nearly non-stop from their campsite on the Gilded Roadway to the Lavish Chateau in Nicodranas, sacrificing stealth for speed. Yasha had carried Beau almost the entire way, with Jester taking over once or twice. They were all exhausted, but Yasha had volunteered to sit with Beau while the others slept. She wasn’t sure whether or not sure regretted that decision now.

Not a shapeshifter.

How could she have been so foolish.

…

_Some time ago..._

Summer came early in the Iothia Moorlands, not that you would have known the difference. The heat was always sweltering, but summer meant that the humidity skyrocketed, and the Dolorov Tribe traveled north in search of a cooler locale.

On the Summer Solstice when the sun was at its peak, Yasha Nydoorin would be chosen a mate.

She was not the only one due to be chosen for; many of her...if not friends, then acquaintances, were also slated to be paired off. For her part, Yasha had no interest in any of the virile looking young men whose names were being thrown around. After all, a mate was chosen in order to strengthen the tribe, to have it continue on, and Yasha had no interest in that.

Or rather, no interest in what she would have to do to participate in that. Since she was putting on her first wools, she had always had more of an eye for the woman of the group. One of her earliest memories was watching the Forge Keeper shape metal into a sword, her large muscles glistening with sweat.

To be chosen to mate with a man was...not ideal, and Yasha did not participate in the idle chatter from the rest of the woman about who they would be chosen to pair with. It was a notion that Yasha found amusing; they were all fierce warriors, many of whom could turn into an equally fierce creature, and they were reduced to gossip.

Yasha was happy for them, but decided that it was not for her. She would perhaps do all the things that was expected of her, such as committing her wifely duties, and bearing a child, but her heart would always be somewhere else.

Her heart would always be with Zuala.

That night was not a hunt night. They were still a week out from the full moon, meaning preparations had not yet begun in earnest for the feast. Yasha had no responsibilities that stopped her from traveling a little way east, to a copse of gnarled old trees.

It was out of sight of the tents that had been set up just days earlier, when the sun was blazing hot at midday. As one of the stronger members of the tribe, Yasha had set up many tents that day, and rewarded herself with a nighttime swim in the marshy, swamp waters. Zuala had come to join her, and they had made love under the light of the crescent moon.

Tonight, Zuala was already waiting for her.

Even wearing a blood-stained woolen tunic, Zuala was a vision. She had clearly come straight from the “pastures” (not that there was any grass in this part of the world), and judging by the blood, the lack of feed had gotten to at least one of the animals, and Zuala’s knife had sliced quickly across its throat, to save the pain of a slow death.

‘I had thought,’ Yasha teased her once, ‘That a were should wait for the full moon before slaughtering animals.’ Zuala had gotten uncomfortable and cold at that comment, and Yasha had quickly realized she had caused offense. She was not very good with people.

‘I saw you today,’ was the first thing Zuala said, when she saw Yasha coming over the hill. ‘Helping the Sky Spear kill that beast. I was very enthralled by it. You will have young men arguing over who gets the chance to be your mate.’

Yasha rolled her eyes. Zuala knew full well that she wanted none of them. Attractive though the men were, objectively speaking, she had utterly no interest. The only one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was the dark-haired, bright-eyed woman standing before her.

‘I will have you know,’ Yasha said, playfully. ‘That bears are very promiscuous. I could have anyone I desired, many times over.’

Zuala laughed. ‘I will have  _you_ know that lions are hardly any less promiscuous. But as members of the Dolorov tribe...’ She trailed off. After all, it seemed strange to follow the tenets of mating for life when they were so flagrantly breaking the other tenets, like being only with the mate that was chosen for them.

Zuala faltered. This had been the part that was always a point of contention between them. Zuala did not want to anger the Sky Spear, but Yasha...Well, Yasha would have done anything to have Zuala by her side, for the rest of her life.

‘We could get married in secret,’ she would say, because somehow, if they wed each other first, then any marriage that came after would be meaningless in comparison. ‘Then...when the time is right, we run away.’

Zuala laughed, as Yasha said it for what felt like the hundredth time. ‘Where would we go, Yash? North? To Rosohna? Or West, to an Empire full of people that would sooner kill us than welcome us.’

Yasha didn’t know if that was true. They had heard all sorts of tales about the Empire, about Rosohna, with the traders that they met on the road. The Sky Spear always frowned at this. Yasha got the impression she did not want them to leave, which was all the more reason that they should do so.

‘What about the first part?’ Yasha murmured, pressing a kiss to Zuala’s soft lips.

‘Getting married?’ Zuala laughed again. ‘Yes, alright then. A lion marrying a bear, the Sky Spear would drop dead if she ever found out.’

Yasha smiled. She sincerely hoped that the Sky Spear never would find out. If she did, then it wouldn’t end well for either of them.

They married in secret, the week before the Solstice. Yasha had no ring to give, nothing save one of the beads from her hair, and a promise that she would remain faithful.

‘Bears may be promiscuous,’ she said, grinning, ‘But I am not. I am yours, forever, Zuala, if you will have me.’

Zuala’s bright eyes shined under the light of the moon. ‘I will,’ she said.

…

When Yasha woke, she felt hardly more rested than when she had first gone to sleep. The sleep had been fitful, filled with dreams about Zuala, and about Beau, and about…

She shook her head. She could not. She could not betray Zuala like that, and certainly not with someone who had lied to her, even if it did pain her to admit it.

Beau had still not regained consciousness. Jester had managed to stop the poison from traveling any further within Beau’s body, but could not figure out how to get it out entirely.

‘This is like...a super bad poison, you guys,’ she said, through tears. ‘Not even the Traveler has seen anything like this. He says we need to go north, but there’s so much north that I don’t know where to start!’

Caleb frowned. ‘What are you not telling us?’ He had clearly been able to tell that she wasn’t revealing everything.

‘He said to go to a _graveyard!_’ Yasha felt her heart hitch in her chest. After everything that had happened, surely Beau could not _die_. That was something that Yasha was sure she could not deal with, even if she was angry with the monk.

The graveyard that the Traveler had told them to go to was  _very_ far north; to the point where they decided that it was easier to beg the Cobalt Soul for use of their  _Teleportation Circle _ to Rexxentrum, a plan which Caleb seemed very, very uneasy about. Not even the Soul’s clerics had been able to cure the death that was pulsing through their acolyte’s system. If it had been anyone other than Beau, Yasha was sure that the Soul would have refused, but her membership within the Order seemed to be at least one thing that Beau had not lied about.

They did not dally in Rexxentrum, and Caleb, for his part, seemed to be very relieved when they were once again out in open country, and Yasha did not blame him. She’d never been a very big fan of cities. Even the larger towns were uncomfortable enough.

The longer they traveled, the worst that Beau seemed to get. Jester cast  _Lesser Restoration_ as many times a day she could afford, and every day, the poison retreated a little less. Dark, black spidery veins began to spread across her face and neck, and when Jester pulled back the sweat-stained shirt (of Fjord’s, since all of Beau’s clothes were ruined), the blackness spread out from the still-healing scar across her torso.

‘Hey Yash, want to take a walk?’ Molly said, one night, after they had set up camp. They had been running on minimal energy, and when Caleb finally collapsed from exhaustion, they decided to stop for a few hours of sleep. The Savalierwood, and the graveyard within it were still a day or so away.

Yasha stared at him, furious. How could he want her to take a walk at a time like this. He came over, and gently took her by the arm, seemingly not taking no for an answer.

‘You’re killing yourself with worry, staying by her side like that,’ he said, simply, as though he hadn’t spent many waking hours by her side, brow furrowed with fear. ‘’What’ll be will be, and whatever happens, we’ll have to deal with that.’ He expected her to die, Yasha realized. He wanted to save her from that pain.

She didn’t die.

Whatever unbridled stubbornness had kept Beau alive against a family that hated her all of these years was also keeping her alive, however barely.

Two days later, they found the graveyard, a few miles into the heart of the Savalierwood. Had Yasha not been intensely focused on the body in her arms, she might have been more fascinated by the age-old graves that littered its boundaries. The trees looked like they were dying.

In the center of the graveyard was a temple, and at the front of the temple was a large, furred creature, with long pink hair. ‘The Wildmother told me you might be coming.’  The creature stood, towering at least a foot over Yasha. He looked them over, eyes locking onto the limp body in Yasha’s arms. He gave a rough sort of sigh. ‘Hold on,’ he said, his voice rumbling. ‘I’ll make some tea.’


	8. Eight

8

The creature – a firbolg named Caduceus he told them, though Yasha had never even heard of a firbolg, let alone seen one before – had prepared a sickbed on the ground floor of the temple.

Yasha laid Beau gently onto the bed, and watched as the firbolg put a hand to her head, and cast  _Lesser Restoration_ . At this point, she had seen Jester cast the spell often enough to recognize it.

She frowned, but before she could say anything, Jester had beaten her to the punch. ‘I’ve been doing that for  _days_ , and it hasn’t helped.’ There was something of an accusation behind it, like; “what can you do that I haven’t already done?”

‘That’s just to stop her from getting any worse. None of the magic I have will help against this poison.’

Yasha felt the rage starting to rise in her. They had come all this way, and now he couldn’t help? 

‘If you can’t cure her, then what _can _you do?’ Fjord asked, perhaps a little threateningly. Caduceus didn’t even seem to pick up on the threat.

‘I never said I couldn’t cure her. I just meant that I couldn’t do it with magic.’ He pulled back the neck of Beau’s shirt, and examined the spidery dark veins. ‘This poison, it’s not from the material plane.’

‘Where is it from?’ Nott asked. More than any of them, she seemed to have the most experience with poisons.

‘It’s from the Shadowfell.’ He spoke the words like they all knew what he was talking about, and then, without even a sideways glance at their confused expressions, began to prepare tea. He filled a large iron kettle with water seemingly from his fingertips, and set it hanging in the fireplace. Then, he wandered outside, into the garden. Yasha hesitated, but did not stand. Nor did any of the rest of them. Yasha looked down, and Beau’s sweating seemed to have slowed a little. She was vaguely aware that that was not a good thing; sweating meant that Beau’s body was fighting back.

‘What’s the Shadowfell?’ Jester asked.

‘It is another Plane of Existence,’ Caleb told them. ‘Where the city Thar Amphala stood, before Vecna brought it to this world to facilitate his rebirth.’ Many faces started at him blankly. ‘It was not that long ago,’ he said, defensively. ‘Perhaps twenty years. The Lionetts are notorious for being Shadow Sorcerers; it makes sense that they would use poison from the Shadowfell, though...I did not think that much would grow there.’ Yasha thought of the hounds that had attacked them, just days ago.

There were a couple of minutes of pained silence, as they waited. Jester pushed Beau’s hair back from her brow, her hand shaking.

Caduceus returned with a handful of leaves and flowers. At least, that was what they looked like. He took a wooden cup, and scattered a few of the leaves at the bottom. Then, he took the kettle and its now boiling water.

‘Got to let it steep for a little bit,’ he said. ‘But you’ll need to sit her up so she can drink it.’

Without even stopping to consider the matter, Yasha moved so that she was sitting behind Beau. Jester and Fjord caught on very quickly, and helped sit Beau up in Yasha’s embrace. The skin, that had been so warm for so many days, was now cold to the touch. If this did not work, then…

Then Yasha did not know what she would do.

Molly put a hand on her shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but he squeezed. No matter what happened, he would be there for her.

‘Tip her head,’ Caduceus instructed. ‘Not too much, just enough so it’ll go down her throat.’ Yasha did as he told her, and Caduceus tipped the tea down Beau’s throat. As much seemed to spill down her front as actually went in her mouth, but the firbolg seemed unconcerned. For a few moments, nothing happened.

‘Did it work?’ Molly asked. His hand gripped against Yasha’s shoulder even tighter.

‘Hmm?’ Caduceus said. ‘Oh...Well, it may take a while before we know, but I’ll probably give her some more tea in an hour or so, just to help things along.’

Yasha did not move from Beau’s bedside. Not because she had feelings that were….not as they should be, but because she was worried. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but the color seemed to be returning to Beau’s face, the dark, spidery veins retreating. The next time Caduceus made tea, her face was almost fully flush, and her skin seemed a little bit warmer. After the fourth cup, Beau looked as though she was merely sleeping.

‘She might still take a while to wake up,’ Caduceus told them. ‘Poison takes a bit of a toll on the body.’ For the first time since they’d arrived at the graveyard, Yasha took the time to carefully consider the firbolg. He was very tall – taller even than her – and had a strange grassy smell that she could not quite place. Definitely a shapeshifter (which was surprising enough in itself). She was still trying to figure it out long after the firbolg had gone to bed.

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Molly asked, surprised, when Yasha asked him if he recognized it. He laughed. ‘I guess it’s probably not really a Xhorhasian thing. He’s a were-cow.’

Yasha frowned. She did not know what a cow was, and Molly gave a snort of laughter when she asked him.

‘They are similar to your Xhorhasian yaks,’ Caleb told her. Sitting in the corner, reading a book, she had not realized that he had been listening in. ‘Used for meat, and milk, and occasionally as a beast of burden.’

So that was the grassy smell she had been picking up on.  There were no yaks in the part of Xhorhas where Yasha was from, but her tribe had traveled far enough north that she had at least seen them before. Large, horned creatures with shaggy fur.

‘Seriously, Yash, we had a whole conversation about how weird it was that the guy the Traveler sent us to also happened to be a shapeshifter. Were you not even listening?’

Yasha opened her mouth to defend herself, but found that she did not have much to even say. It was true that she had been distracted ever since they had arrived, and frankly she thought she had the right to be.

‘Are you okay, Yasha?’ Jester asked. She had looked at both Molly and Caleb before doing so, and Yasha wondered if this was another conversation that she had missed. ‘I mean, we’re all _super_ worried about Beau, but you’ve barely left her side.’

‘I...’ Yasha started, but did not continue. It was a very long story, after all, and the only one who would truly appreciate what it meant was Molly. ‘She reminds me of someone that I used to know.’

‘Oh, like a sister, or a best friend, or something?’ Nott asked. Yasha couldn’t tell whether or not the goblin was being oblivious on purpose.

‘No,’ Yasha said, evenly. She didn’t want to show the sorrow in her voice. ‘She was my wife.’

‘Wait, you were _married_?’ Nott screeched. Caleb gave her a soft elbow to the side. ‘Sorry,’ she said, a little more softly. ‘I mean, you were married?’

‘Yes.’ Yasha nodded, and she could not help but smile at the thought of Zuala, at the memory of her waking up beneath furs, dappled in sunlight, at the memory of hunting together during a full moon, of sneaking off in the middle of the night to make sure that nobody caught them.

The memory of Zuala’s screams as they cut her down, screams that faded as Yasha ran away in utter terror, utter cowardice.

The smile faded.

‘I uh...I was married to a woman in my tribe...but...she is dead now.’ Yasha was not inclined to elaborate further. Things were hard enough without admitting her greatest failure. ‘She was also a were-lion.’ Yasha stopped, remembering that Beau wasn’t even a were-lion at all. Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. ‘It is bringing back memories, is all.’

Yasha was not very much interested in discussing the matter further. She took one last look at Beau (face flush with color, and breathing normally) before taking her bedroll upstairs to sleep.

Caduceus had offered them the use of a couple of rooms in the temple that appeared not to have been slept in in some time. They each had a large firbolg-sized bed, and accompanying firbolg-sized furniture. 

Yasha was not used to sleeping in beds. They were too soft, and made her feel too sleepy. She needed to be able to wake at any given moment, in case something happened. Whether or not Beau’s family would find them in this strange, out of the way place, whether they would even be able to track them through a  _Teleportation Circle_ , Yasha did not know, but she did not want to take any chances. 

She slept with her hand on her sword.

Even with one eye open, Yasha had the best sleep that she had had in many days. At least the best sleep she’d had since they’d been attacked on the road to Port Damali.

When she came downstairs the next morning, the sun was just barely peeking through the windows downstairs. Jester was fast asleep at the foot of Beau’s bed, and Beau herself was once again looking better than she had the night before. Yasha allowed herself to feel the slightest sliver of hope.

In the kitchen , Caduceus was making breakfast. ‘I’m sorry, there’s no meat,’ he said, before Yasha had even opened her mouth  to say good morning.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You just look like the sort of person who would eat meat,’ he said with a shrug. Yasha was not sure whether she was supposed to be insulted or not. Probably not, she decided. She was, after all, someone that did eat a lot of meat. In Xhorhas it had been mostly rat and spider, but since coming to the Empire, she had grown quite fond of pork and chicken. They were heartier than rat and spider, but Yasha still had no small amount of nostalgia for certain parts of her homeland.

That said, his meal of nuts, and fruits and vegetables, spiced with flavors Yasha did not recognize, was no less delicious for having been meatless. ‘ She’ll be hungry when she wakes up,’ he said, indicating Beau.

‘When do you think that might be?’

He didn’t have a clear answer to that question, and Yasha got the vague sort of impression that he didn’t actually know. ‘Once her body is ready,’ he said.  It would have been an ominous phrase, had the healer been in any way intimidating. Though he was much taller than her, and no doubt wielded powerful magic, he looked as though a light breeze might knock him over.  She was sure that if he turned out to be evil, the group could probably take him.

Given the fact that he had healed Beau, though, she decided that he was probably not evil.

Even still, Yasha did not want to stray far. She hung around downstairs for as long as she could before Molly once again dragged her out for a walk.

Now that it seemed likely that Beauregard was going to survive, Molly wasted no time in trying to discern Yasha’s intentions.

‘I mean, honestly, Yash, why do you always go after the difficult ones?’

‘I’m not going after anyone,’ Yasha said, automatically. She was intrigued by Beau, of course, but that was merely because of the false belief that the monk had been in some way similar to Zuala. Molly, apparently, had been thinking along the same lines.

‘I mean, she’s spent the last two months lying to us.’

Yasha frowned. ‘The first six months I knew you, you kept telling  me you were the heir to the throne of the Dwendalian Empire.’

‘And how much better was your life for thinking that you got to hang around with the crown prince?’

‘You also told me that your fortune-telling was real, and not just a carnival act.’

Molly looked offended. ‘It  _is_ real,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t you remember when I first read your fortune and I told you that you’d fall head over heels in love with a frankly very annoying monk?’

Yasha glared at him. ‘I am not in love with anyone,’ she said, firmly.

Molly gave a happy sort of sigh. ‘Yeah, okay,’ he said, but Yasha could tell that he did not believe her.  Yasha stared at the gravestone nearest her; its inscription was in Elvish, and it looked very old.

S he wondered what Zuala’s grave looked like.

The rest of the day passed in contemplative silence. Yasha kept her distance from Beau, not wanting anyone else to invite a comparison that was blatantly untrue. Instead, she went back to the spare room upstairs (“I think that might have been Clarabelle’s room. Or maybe Colton’s; it’s been so long Ii can’t quite remember,”) and slept.

When she rose in the morning, Beau was awake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos to @Aetherion for the suggestion of Caduceus as a were-cow.


	9. Nine

Nine

_Eleven Years Ago_

If the moon hadn’t been so bright, it would have been the perfect night to go stargazing. Often, when the moon was new, Beau snuck out of the house, and climbed up onto the roof. Sometimes Ruidus was out, not thriving in the absence of the larger moon, but present nonetheless.

Her family’s transformations had always been unaffected by Ruidus, and as such, Beau felt something of a kinship with the small moon. Unwanted and unloved, unless it was convenient.

Not that loving her was ever convenient. Even when it wasn’t the full moon, Beau was, at best, tolerated, at worse, considered “useful.” It saved having to pay someone to keep the books, after all.

Beau had tried running away on half a dozen different occasions; full moon, new moon, crescent moon. It didn’t matter. They always found her, and always dragged her back.

After a while, she’d sort of just stopped trying. They would kill her soon anyway, she was sure. When they did, she was going to put up a hell of a fight.

…

When Beau woke, it was dark.

She was alive. Somehow, that was a surprise. Even more of a surprise was the fact that she honestly didn’t feel that bad. Pretty fucking tired, if she was honest, but her brain was surprisingly clear. Given that the last thing she remembered was getting a chunk of silver ripped out of her stomach by Yasha, that was pretty good progress.

She was lying in a bed; not a particularly comfortable one, but a bed nonetheless. It reminded her of the bunk that she’d had at the Valley Archive.

Beau could still feel the stinging pain in her abdomen. She ran a hand across her stomach, and found the skin raised and puckered.

The blade had been silver, but it shouldn’t have affected her  _that_ badly. She wasn’t a shifter, after all.

‘The blade was poisoned,’ a voice next to her said. Beau looked over to see Nott watching over her, yellow eyes almost glowing in the dark. Beau jumped. She really wished she could see in the dark. ‘A poisoned, silver blade. Your family must really hate you.’

Beau laughed. ‘Yep,’ she said, groaning as she pulled herself to a seated position. ‘It’s funny – at the Cobalt Soul, they trained us to resist poisons, but my family are such sociopathic assholes that they use the most obscure poisons possible, because they know I won’t have been able to train for all of them.’ This wasn’t the first time they’d tried to poison her. It had almost been the last.

She should have been dead.

Without her monk training, without Jester there to heal her, she probably would have been dead. If she’d actually been a shifter, she would have been dead. 

‘Any sign of them?’ Beau asked, after another longish sort of silence.

Not shook her head. She took out her flask, and offered it to Beau, who took a very long sip. Probably not a great idea, but whatever. ‘It’s been six days, and we took a teleportation circle, so we think they may be off the scent.’  There was a slightly awkward pause as Nott realized what she had said. ‘Anyway, Fjord and Caleb have been keeping an eye out.’

_Six days_ . Man, that was fucked up. The last time Beau had been unconscious for six days...in fact, she couldn’t even remember the last time. That was how long it had been. Somehow, though, she was still exhausted. She laid back down, thinking she would rest for a few minutes longer.

When she woke, it was daytime. 

Nott was gone from her side, and Jester was there instead. The tiefling was fast asleep, and Beau didn’t dare wake her. She couldn’t imagine that any of the group had gotten too much sleep lately.

A tall, pink-haired, gray-furred person was pouring out tea, and he saw her sitting there, awake. Beau had read about firbolgs, but she’d never actually met one. ‘Your friends have been quiet worried about you,’ he said, in a voice that was incredibly soothing; somehow rumbling and soft at the same time.

Beau didn’t know exactly what to say. At no point in her life had she ever had anyone that would worry about her. At least not to the point of sleeping by her side.

‘Are you hungry?’ the firbolg asked, and Beau nodded fervently. She vaguely recalled Nott telling her she’d been out for a week, and the pangs of hunger certainly seemed to corroborate that story.

He made a very nice breakfast she didn’t even notice the taste of, wolfing (ha) the whole thing down in seconds flat. It occurred to her, suddenly, that he might not have been someone that she should trust.

In any case, the food didn’t kill her, and half an hour later, he let her eat a little bit more (“If you eat too much too soon, you’re going to feel much, much worse, trust me.”). By this point, Jester was beginning to stir.

‘Oh, Beau!’ she said, and immediately wrapped Beau in a bone-breaking hug. ‘Nott said you’d woken up, but then she also said that you were really out of it, and went back to sleep straight away...’ The tiefling continued in her rambling sort of way, and Beau couldn’t help but smile. She hadn’t thought she’d been out of it when waking up the previous night, but she supposed she wasn’t really the best person to judge. She _had_ been very tired.

‘We’re in a place called the Blooming Grove.’ Jester told Beau, when she asked. ‘I spoke to the Traveler, and he told me to come north and find this firbolg dude who would be able to cure you. He lives at the graveyard here.’

‘O...kay,’ Beau said. Admittedly, of all the places she wouldn’t expect her family to be looking for her, a graveyard in the north of Wildemount wasn’t one of them. 

‘I was so worried you were going to die.’ Even though Beau was fine, Jester’s eyes were streaming with tears, which told her exactly how bad it must have gotten. It was weird. For Beau it had felt like a very long, very confusing sleep, only she couldn’t remember any of her dreams. They would come back to her eventually; it just always took a while after they used poison.

The rest of the team looked very happy to see Beau awake. Even Molly gave her a hug, and told her never to do that again. It struck Beau that these people actually gave a shit whether she lived or died. Yasha , strangely, was keeping her distance. Beau could see that the barbarian’s hand still looked red and blistered, presumably from the silver that Yasha had ripped from Beau’s stomach.

Whether or not they had questions, Beau didn’t care; her first order of business was to have a very long, very hot bath, and to get changed out of what seemed to be either Fjord or Caleb’s shirt. Probably Fjord’s. It seemed a bit too big to be Caleb’s.

The firbolg – Caduceus, they called him – was apparently a were-cow. Beau suppressed a laugh. How exactly you could manage to get bitten by a were-cow, she wasn’t sure. She wondered if he just stood around at the fool moon, chewing his cud.

Beau snorted. ‘Cud-uceus,’ she said, mostly to herself.

‘Yes?’ Caduceus clearly did not get the joke, and it wouldn’t really be funny if she had to explain it. ‘Because cows chew...Never mind,’ she sighed. This was a guy that seemed to permanently have his head in the clouds.

The tea was pretty good, though.

The rest of the Mighty Nein, thankfully, seemed to sense that she didn’t want to discuss what had happened when her family attacked. Beau managed a full day and a half without awkward questions before Jester brought it up over dinner.

‘Beau, what did those assassins mean? That you were an abomination?’

Beau hesitated. Well, the truth had to come out sooner or later, apparently. She couldn’t keep it from them any longer. ‘I…I’m different from the rest of my family.’

‘Well, sure,’ Fjord agreed. ‘From what we can tell, the rest of your family are raving lunatics.’ Beau didn’t disagree with that sentiment. No sane family would have done what her family had done.

‘No, I mean….’ She hesitated again. Then, she looked at the faces of the rest of the group. Nott and Caleb, of course, did not seem overly intrigued by what she had to say. Nor, she realized, did any of the rest of them. ‘What the fuck,’ she said, angrily. ‘Do you already know? Did you fucking tell them, Nott?’

The goblin jumped back, as though expecting Beau to hit her. ‘Aaaah! I didn’t tell them anything.’

‘I mean,’ Jester said, doubtfully. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I smelled it the first day we met.’

‘Yeah, we were just being polite,’ Molly added, cheerfully. ‘I mean, pheromones are great, but you, ah...you’ve been using male pheromones. And, you know...the fact that you always mysteriously have somewhere else to be when full moon comes around.’

Well, shit.

Beau absolutely did not want to know how Molly knew the difference between the pheromones of male and female were-cats. The fact that she’d apparently been using male pheromones was embarrassing enough.

‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘So you’ve all just been talking about it behind my back?’

‘I think we kind of just figured you’d tell us about it when you were ready,’ Fjord said with a shrug, but from the looks that transpired, Beau could tell that it had been a topic of conversation that did come up behind her back. If anything, that made it even more embarrassing; that the dark secret she’d been trying to keep wasn’t even a secret at all. Yasha in particular looked hurt, and for some reason, Beau hated that more than anything else that had happened so far.

Well, at this point, there was no point in keeping the rest of the story from them. They were already embroiled in the whole thing. The problem was, the story was kind of complicated. There was one thing though, that was unequivocally true.

Beau ran a hand through her hair.

‘So,’ Beau said. ‘My dad’s a bit of a dick.’ Actually, she realized; even that wasn’t technically true. He was a dick, but she knew for a fact that he wasn’t her real father. Not that it had stopped him from forcing her to call him “father” anyway. ‘I mean, you all already know that, seeing as how...you know...Evil shadow sorcerers and everything. But he wasn’t always a sorcerer.’

That, at least, they had the good grace to look surprised about. Beau continued.

‘They’ve always been were-lions, but the magic bit is more recent. He kind of sort of made a deal with some sort of powerful demon. Got magic powers and a thriving wine business. In return...’

She trailed off. Took a breath. She didn’t even know what it was that her father had promised. Just that he hadn’t delivered on it. ‘He was reneging on his end of the deal, so the demon put a curse on the family. That any child born into the family wouldn’t be able to shape-shift.’ Which was ridiculous, seeing as how she wasn’t even his daughter anyway. She supposed she was part of the family at least enough for the curse to stick. ‘I was the first one born after the curse took hold, and since then, they’ve gotten children through...other means to make sure they can become were-lions.’  That bit she didn’t want to explain. It would open up all sorts of other awkward questions.

‘So...’ Molly frowned. ‘The curse is that you...don’t have the were-lion curse?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘And yet by choice, you decided to hang around a bunch of shapeshifters. Funny, that.’

Beau opened her mouth to explain that it had been out of necessity, rather than any innate desire to be around shapeshifters. She supposed Jester had probably already told them all how she had horrific nightmares whenever the full moon was coming up. Even though it had been years since she’d last been in Kamordah for a full moon, the memories were enough to last a lifetime. It was a regular enough part of Beau’s life that she didn’t even think about it anymore.

‘You know, if you want, I’m sure one of the group wouldn’t mind turning you,’ Fjord said, conversationally, clearly misinterpreting Beau’s reasons for wanting to be around them.

Beau froze. She had a sudden, visceral memory of being nine years old, and terrified out of her mind, heart pounding as lions roared in anger. It was ice cold, and she shivered against the biting winds and snow flurries. Of being ten, and bleeding from half a dozen claw marks across her belly. Of being thirteen, and beaten for trying to run away across the mountains to the west. Her breath quickened.

‘—eau! Hey!’ A voice jerked Beau back to reality. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Beau muttered, though everything somehow suddenly seemed so very far away. ‘I think I might...go for a walk.’ She stumbled over her words, and didn’t even bother waiting for a response, dropping her fork to the table and tripping over her feet to leave the temple. She didn’t particularly want anyone following her, and thankfully, no-one did.

Outside, it was freezing. Here, in the north, it was well into winter, but the trees all had their leaves. None of them looked very healthy, their trunks and roots twisted, and a thick layer of purple thorned vines strangling them. This whole place made her feel of death.

The goosebumps that spread across her body had nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with what had just happened.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known.  Couldn’t have known what they had done to her.

How for years and years she prayed to whatever God would listen that she would wake up as a shapeshifter. That she would become the thing that they so desperately wanted her to be. That they would stop hurting her.  No God ever listened. Even then, no higher power had ever wanted anything to do with her.

As she grew older, the fear and the pain turned into resentment and pain, into a bubbling pool of anger that couldn’t wait to be released. The monks of the Cobalt Soul had helped her harness it, but it still occasionally burst through.

She wandered through the graveyard, occasionally stopping to read one of the epitaphs. Most of them were written in an archaic form of Elvish, the dates going back some five-hundred years.

Near the edge of the graveyard, past the third rusted iron fence, she found a tree trunk that had bent parallel to the ground before righting itself. She sat on the trunk, and stared up at the sky.

There was a strange sort of air to this place that went beyond whatever sickness had consumed it. Even the sky was tinged with a purple that was very similar to the color of one of Yasha’s eyes.

As if the universe had heard her thoughts, Beau suddenly heard the sound of heavy boots trudging through the piles of leaf matter that littered the graveyard, she presumed fertilizing the plants that were growing there. Her parents had always preferred less messy fertilizers, but even then, the halfling workers had always been the ones that had to apply it.

Beau looked up, and saw Yasha standing there. Her expression was inscrutable, which was weird, because whether she knew it or not, Yasha had always been one of the more easy to read members of the Mighty Nein, whether she knew it or not.

‘Hello,’ Yasha said. ‘Can I, ah...Can I sit?’


	10. Ten

10

Beau moved to the side to let Yasha sit, and for a brief moment, Beau was reminded of the nights they had spent together on watch. It felt like so long ago.

Yasha didn’t say anything. She seemed content just sitting there, hand resting casually against Beau’s thigh. It took Beau a few minutes to figure out what was happening. ‘My heart is still beating,’ she said, a little wryly. Yasha started, looking sheepish.

‘I know...but...the others may have told you; it was very scary, not knowing what might happen to you.’

‘Eh, I’ve survived worse,’ Beau said, in an offhand sort of manner. She’d been trying to deflect, but somehow had only brought the attention back on herself.

‘I...’ Yasha paused. Frowned. ‘I understand if you do not wish to talk about it, but...I do not understand why you felt the need to lie to...us.’ Beau could have sworn that there had almost been a “me” there, instead of an “us.”

Beau struggled to think of the right way to answer. She knew what she wanted to say, of course. It was more a matter of finding the right way to say it.

‘My family were looking for a non-shifter,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe that by being with a group of shifters, by pretending to be one of you, I might be able to give them the slip.’ She gave a sad sort of chuckle. ‘The more people that knew, the more dangerous it would be. Guess it didn’t work, though, huh?’ After all, they had found her anyway. How they had found her...well, that was the next question Beau needed to ask herself. She didn’t even want to think about the possibility that one of her friends might have betrayed her. The Lionetts had enough resources that it didn’t have to be a possibility (but it still was anyway).

‘Why do they want to kill you?’

Beau shrugged.

Not that she didn’t know. There was the simple, straight forward answer; that they wanted to kill her to make sure that there were no issues in succession, that she wouldn’t scupper their plans of having her brother (who she’d never even fucking met) be their chosen heir. It wasn’t enough to disown her, or disavow her, or even pretend that she’d never existed. More than that, though, it was starting to feel like everything they did was for the sole purpose of causing her pain. Like those same full-moon hunts, only conducted on a larger scale.

‘I need to show you something,’ Beau said, automatically. She was trying to keep the agony out of her voice.

She unbuttoned her shirt, and shrugged it off her shoulders. She still had her undershirt on, but it didn’t cover the worst of the injuries. Yasha did not even try to suppress her gasp, though, like everything Yasha did, it was muted.

Beau wasn’t sure how she’d managed to go so long without anyone seeing her scars. Every time she’d been wounded in battle, she’d let Jester give her the barest amount of healing before rushing off to fix the rips and tears in the cloth herself, far away from wandering eyes. She’d actually gotten pretty damn good at sewing, over the years, to the point where some of her clothes were more thread than cloth. She supposed, given that she’d been wearing someone else’s clothes when she’d first woken in the Blooming Grove, that someone must have already seen the scars. Probably Jester.

Her torso was a mess of scar tissue; not just bites, but scratches, and cuts, and burns. That was all from before she’d ever even joined the Mighty Nein. On top of those were some fresher wounds, from swords, and axes, and other kinds of weapons.

Yasha did not say anything. Beau couldn’t quite tell whether the look in her eyes was rage, or sadness. Beau didn’t know whether what  _she_ felt was rage or sadness.

‘At first, they just wanted to try and turn me,’ Beau said, not daring to lift her gaze again. She didn’t need to look to know that Yasha was listening intently. ‘But, uh...after it became very clear that the curse wasn’t going to take, it just sort of turned into sport. Their favorite thing to do, whether it was a full moon or not. Give me an hour or so head start, and then...hunt me down. Tear me up, slash me to pieces, all of that. Never enough to permanently maimed. Just enough to keep them entertained. Getting sent away...that was a blessing more than anything else; ‘cos even if they didn’t want me, then at least they weren’t hurting me.’

‘Oh, Beau.’ Yasha didn’t seem to know what else to say. Her eyes were definitely sad, now. No, worse than sad, they were _pitying_. Beau looked down so as not to see them, staring at the ground as she put her shirt back on. She didn’t want pity. She wanted acceptance. Yasha reached down and took Beau’s hands in her own, not doing anything, just...holding them.

Finally, Yasha spoke. ‘Your... _family_ , they are still alive?’ As though they hadn’t just sent assassins out to kill Beau. There was more venom in the word “family” than Beau had ever heard from Yasha in her life.

‘Sure,’ Beau said, in what she hoped was an off-hand sort of voice. ‘Living it up being assholes, sending spectral assassins out after me every now and then. Probably won’t stop until they kill me. Good times.’

‘Do you, ah...Do you want us to kill them for you?’

Beau laughed. The honest answer was probably “yes.” She absolutely did want her entire family dead. But the last thing she wanted to do was put that burden onto her new family. They would never agree to—

‘Where are you going?’ Yasha had stood, suddenly, and was making her way back towards the temple. She looked back at Beau, confused.

‘To tell the rest of the group that we are going to kill your family,’ she said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Beau almost tripped over herself as she jumped up, buttoning her shirt as she went. ‘Yasha—’

Yasha stopped, putting a hand out to steady Beau’s shoulder. ‘You said yourself that they will keep trying until they kill you. That means we need to kill them first.’ 

‘You—’ Beau choked on her words. She cleared her throat, and tried again. ‘You would do that for me?’

Yasha held her gaze for a long time, the hetero-chromatic eyes holding secrets that Beau couldn’t quiet parse. ‘For you, Beau, anything.’

…

‘You’re kidding me,’ Molly said, staring blankly at Yasha. As though she hadn’t just walked back into the temple, and demanded that they travel south-west to Kamordah and murder a family of evil were-lions.

Fjord, too, seemed hesitant. ‘I don’t know if this is really in our, ah, wheelhouse.’

‘They’re dark sorcerers,’ Jester said. ‘That’s totally in our wheelhouse.’

‘They’re also a lot more powerful than us,’ Fjord reminded her. Jester frowned, as though she hadn’t thought of that. ‘Right, Beau?’

‘Sure,’ Beau agreed. ‘Super fucking powerful. Could kill all of us in the blink of an eye powerful. Plus, you know, they’re assholes.’

‘We did wonder where you got it from,’ Molly said, jovially. Beau gave him the finger, but was smiling tiredly. She was glad he wasn’t treating her any differently.

‘They will keep coming,’ Yasha said. ‘They will keep coming until Beau is dead, and we cannot let that happen.’

Beau didn’t dare look at them. She knew what was coming. What had always been coming. For surely they would have discussed it while she was unconscious. She was too much of a danger, too much of a liability to keep hanging around, just in case one of them got caught in the crossfire.

Beau kicked herself.

The negative self-talk wasn’t helping things at all. Hadn’t they taken the dagger from her body, and healed her. Hadn’t they carried her to the other side of the country to find a healer. They wouldn’t abandon her now. She wouldn’t let herself think that.

‘How many people are there in your family?’ Caleb asked. Beau thought on it.

‘My parents, my brother...Uncles, aunts, cousins, all told there’s probably only about thirteen,’ Beau said. ‘But, you know. That’s still six more than there are of us. So, you know...not an easy fight.’

‘Unlucky for someone,’ Yasha commented.

‘There’s, uh…something else,’ Beau said. She hadn’t even really thought of it until they’d seriously started to consider the idea of killing her whole family. ‘Part of that whole curse thing...the curse breaks if any of the original parties are killed. One of which...’

‘Is your father,’ Fjord concluded, when Beau left her words hanging. ‘So if we kill your family...you’ll...’

Beau shrugged.  It was one of those questions that she had spent so long thinking about; that pointless hypothetical of what would happen if she killed her  family.  Just one of those places that her mind went to w henever something bad was happening, which was often. She would be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about how poetic it would be for her to be able to turn into a lion, and tear them all apart.  ‘Who knows. I don’t know if the curse is what’s stopping me from changing, or if it’s something else.’ 

‘Are you...okay with that?’ He was clearly regretting the question that he’d asked previously, having seen her reaction to it.

‘If it’s a choice between that and death...’ It was a well known thing that there was no cure for the were virus. Once you were bitten, you were stuck with it. Most people just tended to make do.

Though she wouldn’t dare admit it to her friends, it was a tough choice. A choice between living as something that she hated, or dying with her freedom intact. Jester and Yasha at the very least would be horrified to hear her say it.

Was it weird that not wanting to upset them was the main thing that actually kept her going? Or was that just what friendship was, that weird, undefinable thing that she had been missing from her life for so many years.

‘That’s a really healthy way of looking at it,’ Caduceus said, warmly. Beau hadn’t even realized he was listening in. ‘Being able to take your pain and turn it into strength. I’m really proud of you for that.’ Beau shared an incredulous sort of look with Molly, of all people. The tiefling was in utter disbelief at the sheer…Beau couldn’t even think of a word to describe it. Mellowness? Positivity? Well, whatever. It was weird.

‘We won’t be in your, uh...hair too much longer,’ Caleb said. ‘Thank-you so much for your hospitality.’

Caduceus smiled. ‘Oh. I didn’t tell you? I’ve been speaking with the Wildmother, and she thinks it’s a fantastic idea if I go along with you.’

The Mighty Nein stared at him. ‘Well, eight against thirteen,’ Fjord said, with a wan sort of smile. ‘Those are slightly better odds. Alright Beau.’ He put a hand to her shoulder. ‘Let’s go kill your family.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I killed my whole family, I'll throw you under a bridge."
> 
> It's my weekend, and I apparently don't have a life, so you get two chapters in one day.


	11. Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sick and have been writing in half a fever dream, so hopefully no-one accidentally turns into a walrus or something.

Eleven

_The moon hasn’t yet risen in the sky when they drag her from her room._

_It’s the same every single month, and yet every single month, she hopes, she begs, she prays that that this time it will be different._

_It’s never different._

_They drag her out to the vineyards, and leave her there. “See you in a few hours,” they’ll smirk. In a few hours, the sun will have set, and the moon will have risen. She’ll still be freezing, and barefoot, and they’ll be in their enormous lion forms, claws sharpened, ready for the hunt._

_The prey is always the same._

_That’s not true, she remembers. Occasionally, they’ll catch a wayward traveler, coming too close to the outer boundaries of Kamordah. Those months, she doesn’t get a reprieve, but she at least has company._

_The company never lasts the night. She feels bad for looking forward to those months; when they have someone else to chase, she ends up with fewer scars._

_This month, she’s alone._

_She goes west, like she often does. She’s no match for the lions across the plains, but up into the mountains, it’s a little more even ground, so to speak._

_This time, it took them less than two hours to find her. At the top of a tree, she could hear them coming towards her, like a stampede in the silent night. They sounded a little different for some reason._

_Beau keeps very, very still. The slightest bit of movement will give her away. They will almost definitely find her by smell, rather than movement, but she doesn’t want to make it easy for them._

_She can feel her heart beating fast in her chest, _ _can feel the ground thudding as the enormous footsteps come clear and closer. It doesn’t even stop to sniff around; it already knows where she is. With enormous claws it swipes at the tree trunk, and Beau might as well not even be holding on for how easily she falls._

_S_ _he lands heavily, barely even managing to roll over onto her back before the creature is looming over her._

_She realizes then, i_ _t’_ _s not_ _ a lion. It’_ _s_ _ a bear. An enormous, hulking bear, that could take her out with a single swipe of its claws. It _ _rears_ _ backwards. In the bright moonlight, Beau _ _can_ _ see its eyes; one green, and one purple._

‘_Yasha—’ she __starts._

_The bear swipes._

‘Beau!’ A voice pierced through the veil of sleep, dragging Beau away from the moment of her death. The room materialized; a room of wooden floors, and high ceilings. Definitely not a tree at the based of a mountain range west of Kamordah.

She looked up, and yellow eyes were staring down at her.

She punched, jumped, and rolled out of bed, onto the floor, and was halfway to the door, when—‘Beau, it’s me! It’s Jester.’ 

Beau’s brain caught up with her, and she slumped to the ground where she stood, breathing hard. ‘Fuck!’ she muttered. Then, a little louder, ‘Sorry Jester.’

Jester was rubbing her jaw where Beau had punched her. ‘That’s okay, I’m sorry I shook you awake like that. You were screaming.’

Beau wasn’t surprised. They were just days away from the full moon after all. Jester’s eyes, more than any of the others, seemed to reflect the moon cycle. Her mother’s eyes had been the same; more than once in her life, Beau had woken to a pair of amber eyes, staring at her reproachfully.

‘Yeah,’ Beau said, awkwardly. ‘Sorry.’ The door swung open, and Yasha barged in with her sword drawn. She looked down at Beau on the floor, and Jester rubbing her jaw.

‘Are they here?’ Yasha demanded. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘We’re fine.’ Beau felt a wave of embarrassment wash over her. ‘I just...had a nightmare,’ she admitted.

‘Oh.’ Yasha also suddenly looked embarrassed. ‘I thought that perhaps...’

Whatever it was that Yasha thought, Beau didn’t find out; Yasha was joined very quickly at the door by Fjord and  Caduceus and Nott. Caleb, at least, had been around for the last lot of nightmares, and would have known her screaming was nothing to be concerned about.  Well, nothing to be overly concerned about, anyway.  Molly probably just didn’t care.

They were in Zadash, bunked two to a room in an Inn called the Leaky Tap. Beau had mixed feelings about being back in Zadash, but they needed to be close enough to get to Kamordah within a short amount of time, and far enough away that their presence wouldn’t put up too many red flags.

Even still, Beau had been heavily disguised as they entered the town. For some reason, Jester was really good at disguise make-up. The tiefling had given Beau a horrible bloody scar across her face, and they had put her in Nott’s glamour armor for the trip from the city limits to the Leaky Tap. Zadash was a city with enough strange looking people that no-one gave them a second glance.

Beau decided against going to the Cobalt Soul. If her family came looking for her in the city, then that was the first place they would look. Even still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some training in with Dairon.

‘Hey Jes.’ Beau got to her feet, a little sheepishly, once everyone else had left. ‘Do you think you could_ Send_ a message for me?’ It had been a thought running through her head for a while now; especially that they were back in Zadash. The idea of meeting up with Dairon for more training seemed...maybe a little inadequate, given what they were going to face, but it would probably make her feel better anyway.

Ever since Jester had gotten the spell, she had been annoying them all senseless with it. Beau had been woken up twice now by the sound of a message in her head. Never anything important. Just because Jester wouldn’t have been Jester if she didn’t use her vast magical powers for pointless things.

If it were anyone else, Beau might have been perturbed, but because it was Jester, it was okay. She’d never really had anyone that was so interested in spending time with her, for no other reason than that they were friends. For that matter, she’d never really had friends before. It was a weird feeling.

‘Oh, sure,’ Jester agreed, seemingly without even thinking about it. ‘Who do you want me to send a message to?’

‘Her name is Dairon; she’s my...I guess you’d call her a trainer for lack of a better word.’ They had technically only met once, but then, Dairon had shown more faith in Beau than all the rest of the Cobalt Soul put together. They were the first one that seemed to see her as more than a burden.

To be fair to Zeenoth, he had warned her about the assassins coming. But that didn’t excuse the years of constant sighing whenever she raised her hand in class, or snuck back in after midnight, or got the shit kicked out of her in a bar fight.

Beau gave Jester a brief description of Dairon, and the message that she wanted to send. Dairon had vaguely mentioned traveling north again after meeting on the Menagerie Coast, but there were a lot of places in the north, so it was a bit of a crapshoot as to whether she would be anywhere near Zadash.

It was just before dawn, based on that soft light outside, but Beau was pretty sure that Dairon would be awake. They seemed like the sort of person that would get up before dawn.

Dairon, it transpired, was in Zadash, and, more importantly, was willing to meet up that day. Right then, as it turned out. Beau had to go to the washroom, and clean the sleep from her eyes before heading out.

‘Do you want me to go with you?’ Jester asked, a little uncertainly. It was a fair question, really. Beau was pretty sure, though, that she was a little safer in Zadash than out in the middle of nowhere on the Menagerie Coast. There were so many different smells, and sounds, and sights in the city that even if they were looking for her here, it might take them a while.

‘Nah,’ Beau said. ‘I’m good.’ If anything did happen, then the last thing she wanted was for Jester to get caught up in it. Plus, there was something that was just so...personal about her training sessions. It was weird.

To Beau’s surprise, Dairon took her, not to the Cobalt Soul, but to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. If the elf had anything to say about Beau’s presence in Zadash, they were at least going to leave it for after their sparring session, apparently.

The session was short, but no less tiring for it. Dairon didn’t pull a single punch, and by the time they were done, Beau was bleeding from half a dozen new places, including a pretty nasty slice across the side of her forehead.

‘You are slow, today.’ Apparently she wasn’t going to pull any verbal punches, either.

‘I got stabbed and poisoned last week,’ Beau muttered under her breath. The words seemed to shake Dairon a little. There was a question in her eyes.

Beau sighed, slightly, and pulled back her shirt to show the still-fresh scar across her abdomen. Though it was probably relevant, Beau decided against mentioning that she had spent the better part of a week unconscious.

‘Your family?’

‘Yup.’

Dairon gave a slight tut, but then ignored the scar in favor of the new wound that was now pumping fresh blood down the side of Beau’s face. 

‘It was reckless to come back to Zadash,’ the commented, as they dabbed the blood away. ‘Clean and bandage this, it may scar a little.’ Beau didn’t bother to mention that she had a friend that could do a lot more than clean and bandage the wound.

‘I, uh...I’m about to do something that’s way more reckless,’ Beau commented. She didn’t know whether she wanted Dairon to help her, or stop her. Dairon raised an eyebrow; it was a fair point, and she didn’t even really need to say anything. Beau had done a shitton of reckless stuff in the past, so “more reckless” was hardly an indicator of anything. ‘I’m gonna go kill them all,’ she said, flatly, waiting for the inevitable rebuke.

‘That is...a very tall order,’ Dairon commented. Not unkindly, and not incorrectly, either. ‘It will be very dangerous.’

‘It will,’ Beau agreed, suddenly realizing that she hadn’t yet lowered her shirt. She let her fist relax, and the hem of the shirt fell back down to her waist.

There was a long pause. Then, Dairon nodded. ‘Well, then I would be failing my duties as a mentor if I did not help you in this endeavor.’

_Um, what_ .

‘You want to help me and my friends come murder a group of evil were-lions?’ Dairon gave a start that was almost imperceptible, at which point Beau realized that it was the first time she had mentioned bringing friends on the mission. The fact that Dairon had been willing to help her go and solo a group of evil were-lions was…

It was more than anyone in a position of authority had ever given Beau. Was this the way normal people went through life, with things like friendship, and people that were willing to help them with things?

‘Your family is not small, Beauregard. You will at the very least need my help, but even then, this will be a daunting task.’

Beau took a shaky breath. ‘You’re telling me,’ she muttered.

‘Can I assume that you have already started on a plan?’

Beau grimaced slightly.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘About that...’


	12. Twelve

Twelve

Beau couldn’t sleep.

The last few nights, as they drew closer and closer to an assault on Kamordah, had been among the worst of her life. Whereas previously, her nightmares had been clustered around the full moon, now, they hit her every night.

She would wake  gasping in a cold sweat, and couldn’t even lie to Jester that everything was okay. It was likely that by now, everyone in Zadash had heard her scream.

It was well past midnight when she climbed onto the roof of the inn, if only to give herself a change of scenery.  It had been snowing non-stop since the full moon, and only now had it died down to the barest hint of a flurry.

It was quiet up there. Unlike in the room, she couldn’t hear the hustle and bustle of the bar below. 

They were three or four days past the full moon. Beau had wanted to stay in the inn, stay far away from the plains surrounding Zadash; her family often traveled far on the full moon nights, four legs taking them much further than two ever could.

It had been Caleb that had convinced her to go with them. ‘We can go east,’ he said, with all the conviction of someone that also wanted to avoid certain parts of Wildemount. ‘I will stay with you.’

Yasha, at the very least, looked like she disagreed with the idea, but did not say anything. Some shifters, Beau knew, were very self-conscious at the idea of non-shifters watching them. It was an intimate sort of thing, shape-shifting. Not that she hadn’t seen her fair share of transformations. Probably far more than most actual shifters, none of them being in very good circumstances.

Frumpkin sat on her lap, and Caleb put a hand to her shoulder. She did not close her eyes as they shifted, but her whole body tensed just the same.

Yasha was the biggest; far bigger than any shifter that Beau had ever seen in her life. So big, in fact, that it didn’t set off any alarm bells in her head. None of her family had been that big.

Ridiculous as it felt, the ones that were closest to actually making her panic and turn tail to run were Molly the snow leopard, and Caduceus the cow. They were close enough to lion-sized that she clenched her fist, and held her breath.

Then, Caduceus let out a very long, very loud  _moo_ , and the tension faded. The snow leopard (Molly) and the ocelot (Jester), both came up to rub themselves up against Beau. It was actually sort of comforting. Certainly not the sort of thing her family would have done. Not in that way.

Nott the rat, and Fjord the otter came up as well, the rat running up her arm and coming to sit on her shoulder.

Only Yasha kept her distance.

They didn’t stick around for too long; full moon meant hunting, even for more benevolent shapeshifters. Caduceus was the only one that didn’t stray too far. Apparently hunting grass wasn’t too difficult,  even if it had been snowing.

It was the closest thing to a good night that Beau had had in a while. Probably the closest thing she’d have for a long time.

On their return, Dairon had chided Beau for her recklessness. Beau rolled her eyes. As though they weren’t about to put Beau in far, far greater danger.

Dairon had come up with the plan, and Beau had agreed to it, but it had taken no small amount of time to convince the rest of the group that it was their best course of action.  Most of them still weren’t sold.

She knew, of course, why they were hesitant.

Actually, hesitant was the wrong word. Yasha, on first hearing it, had issued a blanket, ‘No,’ accompanied by Nott’s ‘Fuck no,’ and Fjord’s ‘No fucking way.’

It had taken some convincing. Perhaps if Dairon had started her speech with something other than “we are going to use Beauregard as bait,” it might have gone down a little better. When they had followed it up with, “using our combined efforts, I am confident we will be able to intervene before they kill her,” it definitely hadn’t helped matters.

The utterly ridiculous thing was, Beau was all for the plan. She was fucking terrified, of course – the last thing she wanted was to be anywhere near her family again – but it was also the course of action that put her friends in the least amount of danger. If they tried a full-on frontal assault, they were going to get slaughtered.

It must have been well past midnight when Beau heard the telltale sound of someone else climbing up onto the roof. They were making no effort to be quiet, which only really meant that it probably wasn’t Nott.

It was Fjord.

Beau admitted, she was a little surprised.

Not that Fjord wasn’t one to pry. He was absolutely one to pry, he just tended to do it in a more subtle sort of way.

Tonight, though, he was anything but subtle. ‘Do you really think that Dairon’s plan will work?’

Beau considered the question. She gave an answer that she considered pretty fucking close to the truth, if maybe not the whole truth. ‘I think it’s the best chance we’ve got,’ she said.

‘Your family continue to send assassins after you,’ Fjord said, more than a little incredulously. ‘Why would you think they suddenly don’t want you dead?’

There was, of course, a simple answer to that question. It was an answer that Beau didn’t particularly want to give, but it was the only answer that would let them move forward with the plan. ‘Because,’ she told him. ‘Lions like to play with their food.’

Predictably, he looked utterly horrified, and she didn’t exactly blame him. After all, they Mighty Nein had only met the wolves. They hadn’t met the bloodthirsty lions that stalked the halls of the Kamordah manor.  The thrill of the hunt was one thing, but if a bounty hunter walked Beau right up to their doorstep, then they would not be able to resist toying with her for a few weeks.

‘Look,’ Beau continued, before Fjord could mention what a horribly fucked up thing she had just said. ‘If it’s a choice between looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, or enduring a few days worth of pain if it means that I can live in freedom, then it’s not even a choice. I...’ Her voice cracked. ‘I can’t keep going through life wondering if this time they’re gonna kill me, Fjord. I just...I really need to do this, and short of hiring out an army, this is the only way I can see it happening.’

‘If you’re sure...’

_Of course she wasn’t sure_.

‘Yeah,’ Beau said. ‘I’m sure.’

…

It was almost morning by the time Beau decided she should at least try to get some rest. Strangely, the conversation with Fjord had helped; she felt strong enough in her convictions that this was the best thing to do. The only thing to do.

Though it was freezing enough that seemed to heat the air, somehow, she didn’t feel all that cold. She slipped a little on the icy roof edge as she swung back down to the window of her room.

The window was locked.

Unsurprising, given how fucking cold it was. Jester had clearly expected Beau to be coming back in through the door, rather than the window.

Swearing, Beau dug around in her pockets for her lockpicks, and transferred them to her foot-wraps for easy access. One hand gripping onto the window, she put a tension wrench between her teeth, and pulled a pick out at random. The lock wasn’t exactly a particularly sturdy one; she could probably brute force it, and still get in without issue.

It was about that time she felt the prick in the back of her neck.

At first, she thought it was just the biting cold air, or that maybe an errant chip of ice had fallen from the roof. Then, she felt her grip on the window begin to slacken.

_Fuckfuckfuck_.

‘Jester!’ she called out, or at least tried to; her voice became lost in the howl of the wind. Her hands slipped, and she fell backwards, a wave of agony shooting through her back as she landed in the tightly-packed snow.

A dark-clad figure loomed over her. She strained to see the face, but even the moon did not seem to provide that much light. They wrestled her staff out from underneath her, and she felt two hard whacks against her ribs. Another burst of agony. She wanted to cry out – tried to cry out – but couldn’t.

The figure finally leaned over, and only when they were nearly face-to-face did Beau recognize the face of her uncle, Bartholomew. He stroked her cheek, and, though paralyzed, she couldn’t stop the nausea that rose up in her stomach. ‘You know what they say, little mouse. Never send a wolf to do a lion’s job.’

…

The next morning Fjord came down to breakfast to find Jester in a panic.

‘Beau didn’t come to bed last night!’ she lamented, as soon as she saw Fjord on the staircase. ‘Fjord, what if she’s been kidnapped!’

Fjord, for his part, was not particularly worried. He had seen Beau not four hours ago, finally admitting defeat to the cold, and going back to bed. He didn’t know how she managed to stand it, given she wore far fewer clothes than any of the rest of them.

‘I’m sure she just fell asleep on the roof,’ he told Jester. ‘She didn’t want to wake you again, I think.’ Even as he said it though, it sounded wrong. Beau had been on the roof not to sleep, but to contemplate. If she’d wanted to avoid waking Jester, she would have booked another room, or perhaps gone to another inn. Both were still valid possibilities.

Even still, he went up to the roof to check.

There was no sign that either of them had been there; while it hadn’t snowed again, there was a fresh layer of frost that coated the roof tiles. They didn’t look like they’d been disturbed, which meant she hadn’t been here in a while.

He sniffed the air. Winter always made it difficult to track things; her scent was there, but a little faint. Probably a few hours old.

Fjord went back downstairs. Once again, the scent was faint, but another, less familiar scent came up. A bald-headed elf in cobalt blue robes.

Of course.

Of course this was part of the plan.

She shrugged off her coat as she entered the inn, looking towards Fjord expectantly.

‘Now, I don’t know what kind of little side plan you’ve got figured out—’ Fjord started, and Dairon interrupted almost immediately.

‘What side plan?’ she demanded. There was an awkward pause. Dairon continued. ‘The plan is as you know it, I will accompany Beauregard to Kamordah, under the guise of a bounty hunter.’ They grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. ‘Why would you think the plan has changed. Tell me!’

Fjord didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He shot a look towards Jester, and they both went for the door.

It was, of course, possible that Beau had gone off on her own, but for some reason that he could not fathom, he didn’t think she would have.

How could he have been so foolish, leaving her alone on that roof, knowing that they were out there, hunting her. Being in Zadash had made them complacent, thinking that the size of the city would somehow hide them.

He smelled the blood before he saw it. A thick, rich coppery smell that he was very, very familiar with. Definitely Beau’s blood. It had been long enough that it had soaked into the snow, leaving a pinkish sort of stain. There wasn’t a lot of it, but there was enough.

She had been down here, and she hadn’t been alone.

There was another smell there; that of an unfamiliar were-cat. Fjord turned to Jester, and to Dairon, who had followed them both out. Dairon did not have the sense of a shape-shifter, and looked at him in askance.

Fjord’s words caught in his throat. He swallowed. ‘They have her,’ he said.


	13. Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next few chapters will contain:  
Psychological abuse  
Physical abuse  
PTSD  
General violence

Thirteen

Beau’s entire body ached.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened. In fact, it was a reasonably frequent occurrence over the years, especially after a full moon.

It did not take a particularly long time for her to figure out where she was. She was intimately acquainted with these cells after all. The number of times she’d spent the days leading up to hunt here, just so she wouldn’t run away.

Beau rubbed her head. Her fingers came away sticky with blood. 

Not surprising, considering, seeing as how most of her clothes were also covered in drying blood. They had taken anything that might be used as a weapon, or a way to escape; her staff, her gauntlets, even her silver dagger. She hoped that whoever had taken that one had gotten a nice burn from it.

_Well, fuck_ .

This certainly wasn’t the way she’d planned for things to go down.

It was true, they had sort of planned for the idea of using her as bait, but not a single part of the rest of what was supposed to happen was in place yet. If her friends were smart, they would run far, far away, and forget that they had ever known Beauregard Lionett.

They wouldn’t. 

That was the stupid thing. In the grand scheme of things, she had barely known them that long at all, but long enough to know that they would come and find her, even if it was to their own detriment.

The fact that she had people in her life that would do that...it was a weird thought.

As if the universe had heard her musings, Beau suddenly heard a voice in the back of her head. A voice that was not her own.

_Hey Beau it’s Jester please tell me you’re okay we know they have you and we’re coming to get you do you know where you—_

The message cut off there. Jester had clearly tried to talk as fast as possible, as though she could get more words in, and it took a few seconds for Beau, in her still woozy state, to try and piece together the message.

‘Hey Jes. Yeah, they...uh...they got me. I’m in Kamordah. In my parent’s estate. You’ll know it when you see it. Listen, if it’s too much risk, please just leave me here.’

Beau wasn’t sure how much of her message got through. More to the point, she didn’t know how long it’d been since she’d been taken. She got the feeling that Jester had tried to send a few messages while she was unconscious. 

In any case, no more messages came. Either Jester was out of spell slots, or she had decided it wasn’t worth it to respond. Beau knew it was probably the former, even though her brain tried very hard to convince her it was the latter. There was something about being in Kamordah that did not great things for her self-esteem.

Maybe something about being locked in a cell in her parent’s basement might’ve had something to do with it.

That said, it was pretty nice compared to all the other cells she’d been in since then. Not that that made it any better. There was a real bed, with a rock-hard mattress, and actual sheets. The walls were painted an ugly sort of yellow color, and there was both a toilet and washbasin. 

Instead of bars, there were four very solid walls that would ruin any weapon you tried to put through it. The door was just as heavy, with a complicated lock that would take a long time to pick. Something sharp and awkwardly shaped poked against her ankle, beneath her foot wraps, and she was pretty they were the only thing that was going to get her out of here.

Lockpicks. She’d put her lockpicks in her footwraps, and...and they hadn’t found them.

She felt a surge of energy rise within her. It wouldn’t get her out of the house, but maybe it would get her out of the room.

Foot facing away from the door, she leaned down as if to scratch her foot. She didn’t think they were watching; for the most part, they tended to leave her to her own devices while she was down here, but it had been a long time. Things had changed.

Before Beau could even look at the door, she heard the telltale sign of it being unlocked. Faster that she had ever moved in her life, she hid the lockpicks under the mattress of the bed.  She’d just barely managed to swing herself onto the bed, and fix an appropriately disgusted look on her face when the door opened.

The veneer dropped immediately, and Beau could not help but let out a gasp at the person who walked into the room.

Beau closed her eyes.

‘Beauregard.’ Her mother’s voice was warm, but Beau had heard that warmth far too often to be fooled by it. A hand stroked her cheek, and she could not help but recoil. ‘How wonderful to see you.’ Beau didn’t dare meet her eyes. 

‘Don’t,’ she muttered. She felt weak, and small. How could she have ever thought that this was a good idea? ‘Don’t fucking patronize me, mother. Just fucking kill me and be done with it.’

‘No-one wants to kill you Beauregard.’ She gave a low chuckle. There’s no-one that gives quite as good sport as you do.’

Bile rose in Beau’s throat, and she had to clench her teeth shut, clench her fists, to stop it from rising up and coming out. Not that she would have cared about vomiting all over mother’s dress. It would have been funny, even if it would have gotten the shit beaten out of her. More than anything, she didn’t want to look any weaker than she already did. Stupid, really. No matter what she did, they were never going to think of her as strong.

Something landed on the bed with a soft thump.

‘Get dressed, Beauregard’ her mother said, voice a little colder now. Beau wasn’t so stupid as to think that it was a request, rather than an order. ‘Your brother wants to meet you.’

…

Beau stared at the clothes for a very long time.

She didn’t want to wear them.

Even if they had been anything close to the clothes she normally wore, she wouldn’t want to wear them.

The dress was knee length, and the same ugly yellow color as the walls. The heels on the shoes were not too high, but they had a multitude of pointless straps that made them not very practical.  They were the same sort of clothes she had always been forced into, during those rare occasions they didn’t have her locked up in a cell, or in her bedroom.

On someone else, they surely would have looked beautiful. Someone who didn’t have weird, boyish proportions, or a body covered in scars, or a face that looked like they wanted to beat the shit out of anyone that spoke to them.

On Beau, though, it was...well, it looked very out of place.

She had painstakingly washed her hair and her body of blood, drying herself with a clean patch of her traveling cloak. She put on the dress, finding it more than a little tight across the shoulders and thighs. She’d put on a decent amount of muscle since last she’d been here.

She took her hair out of its topknot, and let it hang free. It wasn’t something that had been explicitly mentioned, but she knew mother always preferred her hair down, and...well, everything would be much, much easier if  she didn’t go out of her way to upset mother.

There was a strange beat, and Beau realized suddenly, horrified at her own thought process. She’d been back in this stupid fucking house all of five minutes, and already, the brash, outspoken rebel that had caused many a facepalm at the Cobalt Soul had been replaced with a shy, meek  coward.

Beau put her hair back into its topknot. If she was going to die, then she would at least die as some semblance of her own self.

It was not mother that came for her. It wasn’t any member of the family, nor anyone that Beau recognized.

It made sense that the servants had changed over the years, but it still kind of creeped her out that people would willingly come and work for the family. 

He grabbed her arm, and pulled her to the door. ‘Hey, I can fucking walk, buddy,’ Beau snapped, jerking her arm out of his grip. He looked at her, a little surprised by the antagonism. 

She kept a very close eye out as the guard led her upstairs. Victims of the hunt were not the only prisoners kept down here. They also, she knew, occasionally captured other shifters, and judging by the silver instruments  hanging on the walls, probably tortured them too.

That would be handy for later.

The house proper seemed scarcely different from the last time she had been here, the same overpriced furniture, the same echoing halls. Beau was led through half a dozen rooms that were empty of people before they came to the sitting room. She sat down on the couch, and resisted the urge to put her feet on the coffee table.

It was another ten or fifteen minutes before anything happened. The guard was getting antsy, but Beau knew that it was part of the intimidation tactic against her. Make her think that something horrible was going to happen.

The sound of heels against tiled floor alerted Beau to her mother’s return. She felt another wave of nausea wash through her, and once again turned her gaze back towards the floor.

The guard elbowed her, gesturing that she should stand. She did so, biting her lip as mother came to stand next to her.

‘Stand straight,’ her mother hissed, and it didn’t even cross Beau’s mind to disobey. ‘Timothy,’ she said, in a much louder, much nice voice. ‘This is your sister, Beauregard.’

The boy was young – not much more than seven or eight – and had dark hair, and dark eyes. He looked far more like the rest of the family than Beau did, even though she knew he did not share any blood with them.

‘Where did you kidnap him from?’ she asked, brusquely, earning her a backhand across the face from mother, who hadn’t even bothered to turn her head.

Beau bit back a swear. The kid looked absolutely fucking terrified, which, weirdly, was a good thing. It meant that they hadn’t had him long. Hadn’t gotten their claws in. Hadn’t broken him.

He also had an ugly looking scar on the side of his neck. Beau knew what that meant, too, even if she didn’t particularly like it. They’d already turned him.  Any nausea she’d been keeping back rose again in full force.

‘I shall leave you two to get acquainted.’ Beau stared after her mother as she left. That was definitely not suspicious at all. Why on Exandria would she leave Beau alone with this kid, knowing that she was going to do exactly what was not wanted of her to do.

Beau leaned over to the boy. He definitely wasn’t a Timothy. ‘Hey,’ she whispered. ‘What’s your name? Your real name.’

The boy sniffed.  He’d definitely been crying. Beau empathized. She’d spent a lot of nights crying in this house. ‘Benjamin,’ he said.

‘Benjamin,’ Beau repeated. ‘Okay, Benjamin, can you tell me where you’re from?’

‘Rexxentrum,’ he told her. Beau was a little bit surprised. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she thought that her parents would be kidnapping children from small farming towns, rather than enormous cities.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. I know things are really scary right now, but I promise you, I’m going to do every fucking thing I can to help you get out of here.’ She winced slightly, as she remembered that the kid was seven years old if he was a day.

‘Did they take you too?’

‘Yeah,’ she told him. ‘They did.’

‘Are your family missing you?’ Beau hesitated. Benjamin obviously didn’t know about her connection to this place, and strangely, Beau didn’t really want to tell him. She didn’t consider _these_ people her family. They were her blood, of course, but they weren’t her family.

Her real family were  coming to get her.


	14. Fourteen

Fourteen

After less than twenty minutes, Beau was dragged back to her cell.

She knew what her mother was trying to do. Trying to get her attached to this poor kid, making sure that she would toe the line by threatening his safety.

The sad thing was, it would probably work. The last thing Beau wanted was for an innocent kid to get caught up in her family’s bullshit.

That changed her plans slightly. 

Not that she really had a concrete plan anyway. Nothing beyond get out of the cell, kill as many people as possible, and get the fuck out of there.

Still not the worst plan, but there were other factors to consider. Like how she was certain that if they caught her doing any of this, then they would almost certainly try and hurt the kid. Which, of course, was what they were counting on.

Beau laid on the bed, and stared at the ceiling.

She slept, but it was fragmented, tormented, fitful sleep. There must have been a dream, or a nightmare, because she woke up sweating and shaking, but try as she did to remember it, she couldn’t.

She had planned to get up in the dead of the night, to find her father, and to...well, to end this.  Somehow, though, in spite of the nightmare, she had slept through to morning. 

‘Fuck,’ Beau muttered to herself. She wasn’t sure how late it was, and whether or not she’d slept through a message from Jester. She was kind of surprised, though, when the guard came to get her.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded.

‘Upstairs,’ he grunted, which Beau had already kind of figured out. She was apparently going too slow for his liking, though, because he grabbed her by the arm, and started to drag her.

‘I can fucking walk!’ she spat, pulling her arm away, and picking up the pace a little bit.

She had half expected to be dragged into the dining room, to have sit through an agonizing breakfast, where she was mocked and belittled. Nothing new there. Instead, she was taken to parlor nearest the entrance hall, where her mother was waiting.

‘How is it creased already?’ her mother said, snidely, pulling Beau roughly towards her, and straightening the yellow dress. Her touch turned almost gentle as she brushed Beau’s hair behind her ears. ‘You remember, I’m sure, how much we want to keep you and your brother safe.’ It was a threat, and not a particularly thinly veiled one. Beau barely had time to figure out what the fuck it was about before she was directed (not dragged, this time) from the parlor, to the foyer, where things very quickly became clear.

There were two figures standing  at the door . One was Dairon, and the other, she suspected, was a disguised Fjord.  At least, he held himself the way Fjord did, even though he was disguised a mustachioed human in Cobalt Soul robes. 

She stared at them, mouth agape. They stared back.

An ice cold hand pressed against Beau’s spine.

‘You don’t want to leave here, do you, Beauregard?’ Mother said, evenly. Beau could sense the menace behind the words. That if she left, then Benjamin was in danger.

‘No.’ Beau’s voice warbled. ‘No, I w-I need to stay.’ She gave Fjord and Dairon a look of desperation, of pleading. _Please understand what I’m trying to tell you._

Dairon held Beau’s gaze, and finally – finally – nodded. ‘Very well then,’ they said, evenly. Fjord, for his part, was very clearly hiding a look of horror. She supposed the bruises on her face and her neck, plus the really fucking ugly yellow dress...well, they weren’t exactly good things.  Not that there was really anything good about this whole situation.

‘You have your answer,’ Mother said, coldly. ‘Now please leave before I set the dogs on you.’ She spoke in the same sort of voice that Zeenoth used when telling people that the library was closed. Beau was a lot more scared of her mother than she ever had been of Zeenoth.

‘I’m glad you made the right choice, Beauregard,’ Mother said. She stroked Beau’s cheek once more, and Beau closed her eyes. If she couldn’t see, then maybe she could pretend that it was someone else touching her like that. Yasha, preferably, but she’d even accept fucking _Molly_ over any of the members of her family.

For her obedience, Beau was rewarded with cold eggs for breakfast, back in her cell. They were probably a couple of days old, but she had been starting to get hungry, so she wolfed them down in seconds flat.

Afterwards, she laid back, and stared at the ceiling again. There wasn’t exactly much else to do.

_Beau, what’s going on, Fjord and Dairon said you needed to stay there, Beau what are they doing to you? Have they turned you against—_

The  words jerked Beau from her reverie. She had been wondering when this message would come.  She supposed that Fjord and Dairon had just gotten back to wherever it was the Mighty Nein were staying, and explained what had happened at the house. She should probably respond, lest Jester think that Beau actually  _had_ turned against them.

‘It’s not that simple, Jes. I’m not the only one that’s being held hostage here. There’s a kid that they’ve turned, and I can’t leave him on his own.’ That was about twenty-five, right?

There was a few minutes of silence, during which Beau assumed that Jester was relaying her words to the rest of the group.

_We will make plans, try and figure out how to get you out of there, Dairon wants you to do some reconnaissance, but stay safe._

Jester spoke slower this time, more methodically, and Beau got the impression that the message had been prepared by the whole group, and written down to make sure nothing was missed.

‘Okay,’ Beau breathed. ‘Okay. I can do that. So far, I’ve only seen about four – my mom, my uncle, a couple of guards...’ She trailed off. It did seem odd that there weren’t more people around. Unless their murderous ways had started to direct inwards. That was probably more than she could have hoped for. The fact that she hadn’t seen her father yet was somehow very foreboding.

That was something to look into when she did her reconnaissance.

For the next twelve hours or so, Beau did scarcely little. She tried to meditate, but dark thoughts kept pressing in on her, the same way they always had when she’d been in this house, in this cell. The Cobalt Soul  _had_ been helpful in dealing with some of the trauma, but even they couldn’t do much now. Even Dairon…as grateful as Beau was that her mentor was there, it felt like an impossible situation. Forget reconnaissance, she would have to do something a lot more drastic.

She dozed off again for a little while, and when she woke, nothing had changed.  Though there were no windows in the cell, Beau was fairly certain it was the middle of the night. For all that her family were evil sorcerer shapeshifters, they generally tended to keep normal hours. One had to, if one wanted to stay up-to-date in the wine-making world.

Slowly and quietly, Beau made her way to the door. She listened at it for almost fifteen minutes, and, when she was satisfied that there was no-one out there, she set to work on the lock.

She was nowhere near as good at picking locks as Nott was, and it took several frustrating minutes – plus a broken pick – to get the lock open.

The hallway was empty.

It was weird, and a little unsettling, but not overly so. They’d never bothered to post a guard there when they’d put her in the cells before, apparently figuring that both the locks and her fear would keep her in line. 

This time, though, she wasn’t the same scared, scrawny teenager. She was a scared, slightly less scrawny adult, who had picked up no small number of skills in the time that she’d been away from Kamordah.

One of those skills involved being pretty handy with her fists, but fists weren’t going to help her against a household full of were-lions. For that, she needed silver, and thankfully, she’d seen a whole fucking shelf of the stuff on her way upstairs earlier that day. Judging by the lack of screams, they didn’t have any shifter prisoners at the moment, or even any other prisoners at all. The silence was a little unnerving.

There were dozens upon dozens of silver instruments  on the shelf , the majority of which were more for causing pain than doing any significant amount of damage. Beau looked them over, and selected a small dagger  – more of a knife, really – that she could easily conceal in her clothes. She took another one for good measure, and shoved it into her  breast-band. At least then, if she was caught with one, there was still a second.

I t wasn’t until she made it up into the house proper that she realized that something was wrong.

The oil lamps were still lit, even though everyone should have been in bed at this time. Even then, every single member of the family, save Beau, could see in the dark. If there were lamps up…

Beau froze. 

She saw her father standing in the doorway.

He wasn’t a particularly imposing figure; shorter by far than his wife, he was a little pudgy around the middle, and his dark hair was receding significantly. Given that there was technically no blood shared between them, Beau looked nothing like him, and yet somehow, she still saw part of herself in him. It was a part of herself that she hated, a part filled with anger, and mistrust.

For a moment, they simply stared at each other.

Then, h e laughed, uproariously. ‘There you go again, Beauregard, always disappointing me. I was so sure you’d learned your lesson, that you’d stay in your room like a good girl.’ His laugh turned to a snarl. ‘But you’ve never been a good girl, have you?’ Her father flipped a gold coin to Bartholomew,  who Beau only just realized was standing next to him. He didn’t even look at the coin before pocketing it. Her father sighed. ‘I thought those ingrates at the Soul might have beaten some sense into you, but I suppose that’s always been the family’s job.’

Beau’s body tensed. Her fists clenched. She wasn’t going to let herself get kicked around without putting up at least a little bit of a fight.

‘They did more for me than you ever did.’ She expected the strike that came, and parried it with her forearm. On instinct alone, Beau retaliated with a pretty fucking nice right hook, and he wasn’t paying nearly enough attention to block it. There was a slow, pained silence. Beau felt a sudden surge of dread.

His hand moved faster than she’d ever seen it, going straight for her throat. His skin was ice-cold, and Beau could feel her own skin starting to freeze beneath his touch. He lifted her by the neck, a ghostly hand superimposed over his own, as though she weighed little more than an infant. Beau lashed out with her feet, but it did little more than send her whole body swinging, and make it even harder to breathe than it already was.

The frostbitten cold spread from her neck, to her head and shoulders, and darkness pressed in around her. It was only when she was seconds away from passing out that her father threw her to the ground, without care for how heavily she landed.

Beau put her hands to her throat, finding it utterly numb, and gasped as she tried to suck in as much air as possible. For good measure, he kicked her in the ribs.

Once again, Beau clenched her fist.  _Don’tcrydon’tcrydon’tcry._ She choked out a sob, and her father laughed. ‘You always were a bit of a whiner,’ he said, looking down on her with utter indifference.

There was a retort swimming around in her head, like: “well, you’d be a whiner too, if your family hunted you for sport once a month,” but the feeling was starting to return to her throat, and she didn’t want to antagonize him even further.

Instead, she stared down at the ground. Her hand twitched, and went for the silver knife.

He grabbed her wrist before she could even so much as pierce the skin. ‘Nice try, Beauregard,’ he snarled. ‘But if you really want to fight, then...well, I’m sure that can be arranged.’ 

His grin, when she finally did look up, was murderous. ‘It’s not the full moon, but, well...we’re never ones to turn down a good hunt.’


	15. Fifteen

Fifteen

The Mighty Nein congregated up in Caleb and Nott’s inn room, the wizard having put his silver thread across the threshold of the room, and sent Frumpkin to ensure that no-one was listening in to their conversation.

‘How could we have let this happen,’ Yasha demanded. ‘We knew they were after her, why did we not keep a closer watch on her well-being?’

Fjord didn’t have an answer. He had thought, as they all had, that they were safe in Zadash.

Clearly not.

Jester had sent out almost as many messages as her magic would allow, and had received no response.

‘What does it mean,’ Yasha asked. ‘If you do not get a response.’ She seemed like she was trying not to let her fears show.

Jester looked suddenly even more devastated than she had previously. ‘That she’s dead,’ she said, in a high pitched voice.

‘Now, I’m sure there’re other explanations,’ Fjord said, in a calming sort of voice. ‘Maybe she’s being held somewhere, and can’t respond.’

‘Or, she could be unconscious,’ Molly offered. None of these explanations seemed to calm Jester’s fears, and, in all honesty, they did not do much to calm Yasha’s fears either.

Fjord, for his part, was worried.

True, Beau had been very isolated in the time that he had known her, but she was not one to wander off from the group without explanation in the way that Yasha did. If she wasn’t responding to messages, then there was a very good reason for it.

Not that he was going to tell Jester or Yasha that.

Jester, he sort of expected it from. Not that Jester was overly emotional, just that she wore her heart on her sleeve a little more than the rest of them. Yasha, though….that was interesting. Beau didn’t exactly hide her flirting, but he’d never really considered that Yasha might reciprocate.

Of all of them, Yasha played her feelings closest to the chest. Even her rages were quiet, internal sort of things.

‘We know where she is,’ Yasha said, sounding very confused about the whole situation. ‘Why can we not just go there and retrieve her?’

‘You remember what she told us,’ Molly reminded his friend. ‘There’re way more of them then there are of us.’

‘So we go in and kill them.’ Yasha was getting angrier and angrier, as though this was a course of action that none of them had considered.

‘Yasha, it’s too dangerous to go in there without a plan,’ Fjord started, but Yasha was having none of it.

‘Then I will go in myself!’

Before any of them could say anything, Yasha had left the room.

…

‘Then I will go in myself!’ Yasha thundered, so loudly that the whole room shook. She would not – _could _not _– _leave Beau to die there, the same way she had left Zuala to die.

No-one even bothered to argue, nor did they stop her when she stormed off to the bar downstairs. She was not much of a planner, but then, there was not much planning involved in a rampage. She was sure she could easily take on a lion in her were form. A whole pack (pride?) of lions, though, was another matter.

Instead, then, she sat at the bar, and ordered a very large tankard of ale. She was not surprised, nor was she disappointed, when Molly came to sit beside her.

‘Decided against a suicide mission, huh?’ he said, flagging the bartender down for a shot of whiskey.

‘Would you go with me if I asked?’ she said, and Molly didn’t even stop to consider the question.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’re family, aren’t we? Even if I do think you can do way better.’

It took Yasha several moments to understand that he was talking about Beau. ‘I...do not agree,’ she said. She did not expect Molly to understand. Molly, who (though she loved him dearly) did not take relationships very seriously.

It did not help that he and Beau had been somewhat adversarial since the day they’d met. The fact, then, that he was still willing to go towards his possible death to help meant a lot.

‘Y’know,’ Molly continued. ‘Not all of our plans have been terrible; I’m sure we could pull off a successful rescue mission against a dozen powerful werelion sorcerers.’ When he put it like that, it sounded like the impossible task Yasha knew it to be. And even that was if Beau was still alive.

‘She’s alive!’ came Jester’s voice, as she ran into the bar. ‘Yasha, she’s okay. I _Sent_ her a message, and she replied! She’s in Kamordah, in her parent’s house!’

Yasha stood, clattering her still full tankard across the bar. ‘Is she hurt?’ she demanded. ‘What have they done to her?’

‘I could only _Send _one message,’ Jester said, miserably. ‘I used them all up trying to message her earlier. She sounded...She didn’t sound like she was hurt, but...’

‘But what?’

‘She sounded a little scared,’ Jester admitted. ‘I mean, I could tell she was trying not to, but...I don’t think her family are very nice people.’

Molly barked out a laugh. ‘What gave it away?’ he asked. ‘The assassins they sent after her, or the fact that they kidnapped her from right under our noses?’ It was unlike Molly to be so snappy towards Jester, but Jester was worried enough that she didn’t even seem to notice.

‘Anyway,’ Jester continued, speaking very fast. ‘Fjord says we should pack up and get ready to go.’

‘Go where?’ Yasha asked, not quite daring to hope.

‘To Kamordah, of course!’ Jester said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘We have to get her back!’

…

Zadash to Kamordah was not a long journey, but Dairon insisted on taking a roundabout sort of route, going to Deastock first, and making that their base. They didn’t know just how much influence the Lionetts had in Kamordah; everything Beau had told them indicated that the family had an iron grip over the town.

They booked three rooms at the _Rose-Nestled Inn_. Dairon did not seem particularly interested in rooming with any of them, but given the lack of vacancies, reluctantly agreed to room with Jester and Yasha.

There was not much rooming to be happening though; it had taken only fifteen minutes or so of hurried discussion for the group to agree that Fjord and Dairon would undertake reconnaissance in Kamordah.

Fjord was not particularly looking forward to spending the afternoon with Dairon, who he still did not quite have a bead on. Fortunately, it was also decided that the rest of the group would make the journey north, and hang back when it came to visiting the house proper. That is, all of them, except for Nott and Jester. Because really, Fjord and Dairon were only the distraction while the self-proclaimed “Best Detectives” scoped out the house properly.

As they drew closer to Kamordah, Yasha seemed to grow more and more tense. They all did, Fjord realized, but Yasha was the one he was paying the most attention to. He didn’t want her to run off from the group and try and mount a rescue mission on her own.

Apparently, that wasn’t on the cards. Molly, it seemed had dissuaded her from that course of action, which was at least something, but, depending on what they found, Fjord wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold Yasha back. Depending on what they found, he wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to hold Yasha back.

Beau had said that they would recognize the house when they saw it, and she wasn’t wrong. Fjord felt a deep sense of foreboding as he looked upon what could only be described as a mansion. Actually, no, it was more than that. It was an entire _estate. _You could have fit entire towns in the land that made up the Lionett estate.

‘This is...very large,’ Fjord said, less to Dairon than to himself. He had used his Mask of Many Face to disguise himself as a generic looking man who would not be out of place at the Cobalt Soul. It had been Dairon’s idea to go in under an official banner, because it meant they would be doing as little lying as possible. Not that either of them had a problem with lying. This was just the sort of situation where lying might make matters worse.

In addition to the disguise, there was a small snake curled around Fjord’s neck. Caleb had initially planned on sending Frumpkin, but at the last minute decided to Wild Shape into a snake, just in case the extra support was needed.

That left Nott and Jester to infiltrate, and Yasha, Caduceus and Molly as back-up. The last line of defense, so to speak.

They were met at the gate by two guards, who seemed perplexed, but not overly worried to see two apparent members of the Cobalt Soul wanting to speak to Mr Thoreau Lionett. Fjord was glad that Dairon had this information, because it was something he’d have known nothing about if he’d come here on his own.

They were not met by Mr Lionett.

They were met by a tall, regal looking woman with high cheekbones, and very familiar looking blue eyes. She looked unnervingly like Beau, though without the chip on her shoulder.

‘Please forgive my confusion at this….unexpected invasion into my home,’ said the woman that Fjord assumed to be Beau’s mother. ‘My understanding was that our business with the Cobalt Soul was finished.’

‘We are here to see Beauregard,’ Dairon said. There was a very long pause, and Fjord thought he detected the slightest intake of breath from Mrs Lionett. She definitely hadn’t been expecting that. ‘We know she is here.’

‘You seem to be misinformed as to Beauregard’s…situation.’ Mrs Lionett was reading between the lines. ‘Know that she is here of her own free will.’ Fjord couldn’t help but snort. He felt the snake slither anxiously across his shoulders.

‘If you do not believe me, then I will go and fetch her for you.’

‘Please do.’ Dairon shot Fjord a look that very clearly read “please shut the fuck up.” Fjord steeled himself.

They were waiting for almost twenty minutes. Fjord tried to peer past the guards at the door, but was pushed back by the tip of a sword. He held his hands up in defeat. Dairon gave him another look.

Finally, he heard the sound of footsteps tracking across the expensive looking floors. Two sets of them.

The first belonged to Beau’s mother.

The second belonged to Beau.

At first, he didn’t recognize her. She was wearing an ill-fitting dress, and the sort of shoes that she normally would have scorned at other people for wearing. Though it had been barely a day, she looked somehow smaller than usual, none of the lean muscle, or self-assured bravado that she normally had.

Beau looked, in a word, broken. There was a look in her eyes that Fjord had only ever seen before in a wounded animal; a look of utter terror. It was to the point where he was almost convinced that it wasn’t even her.

‘You don’t want to leave here, do you Beauregard?’ said Beau’s mother. She wasn’t looking at Beau, but at Fjord and Dairon, though her hand was pressed against Beau’s back. Fjord felt a surge of rage, and it took everything in him not to act. 

‘I need to stay,’ Beau said, in a shaky sort of voice, but it was with those words that her resolve seemed to strengthen, her whole body straightening. She was looking, not at Fjord, but at Dairon, whose mind seemed to be going into action.

‘Very well then,’ the elf said, finally. They didn’t sound defeated. More...shrewdly calculating. As though they’d already started to make plans in their head. Plans that very clearly didn’t involve consulting with the rest of the Mighty Nein.

‘You have your answer,’ Mrs Lionett said. ‘Now leave, before I set the dogs on you.’


	16. Sixteen

Sixteen

Fjord waited until they were well away from the estate before rounding on Dairon. Caleb had already slithered his way down, and reverted into his human form. He seemed to be thinking, either barely noticing or not caring about the tension that was building.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Fjord demanded. ‘We can’t leave her there.’

‘We are not going to leave her there,’ Dairon said, evenly. ‘However, it is clear that her family will not take their claws out so easily. We should have the blue one message her again, to determine the true situation, and proceed accordingly.’ Somehow, only one part of that sentence seemed to reach Fjord.

‘Jester,’ he said.

‘What?’ Dairon sounded confused, and more than a little impatient.

‘“The blue one” - her name is Jester.’

Dairon did not seem to recognize his response as a rebuke. In fact, they seemed utterly focused on the matter at hand, and any subject matter other than one relating to Beauregard appeared to be a waste of her time.

Admittedly, that was probably the attitude that they needed right now.

‘We need to rendezvous with your friends,’ Dairon continued. She stared at Fjord pointedly. ‘With Nott and Jester. Once we know what they have discovered, we will be able to plan properly.’ If anything, that annoyed Fjord more; that Dairon knew the names, but did not care to use them.

On their way out of Kamordah, they stopped at one of the taverns. Fjord gave the bartender a not insignificant sum of gold. ‘If anything happens up at that house. Anything that you would consider...out of the ordinary, I want to know as soon as possible. Fast enough, there’s more gold in it for you.’

‘It is a four hour ride from Kamordah to Deastock,’ Dairon told him, as though he didn’t already know that. Any message that got to them would likely get there too late. If they stayed in Kamordah, though...well, it wouldn’t end well for any of them. They needed to make it look as though they were leaving town. But, he reasoned, that didn’t mean they needed to go all the way back to Deastock.

‘We can find a place to hole up off the road,’ he suggested, and to his surprise, Dairon agreed without question.

They met up with Yasha, Molly and Caduceus not far out of Kamordah, Yasha with a very strained look on her face as she waited for answers.

‘She’s okay,’ Fjord reassured her, even though he wasn’t entirely certain how true that statement was. Beau was alive, and mostly unharmed, but okay...that was a different thing altogether. Dairon wasn’t wrong; they needed Jester to be able to figure out the full scope of what was going on.

It was another half hour before Jester and Nott arrived, both of them looking harried, as though they’d had to run away in a hurry.

Given that they’d been infiltrating the house of were-lions, it had always been a very real possibility that they’d be noticed, and, according to Nott, they’d had to employ a few dirty tricks, including tricking one of the guards into thinking that his pants had fallen around his ankles.

‘Okay, so there are a _lot_ of guards,’ Jester told them. ‘And like...even after we got past the guards, there were a bunch of were-lions. I think we saw five or six—’

‘Six,’ Nott interjected, ‘Before they smelled us and we had to get out of there _really_ quickly.’

Fjord was a little worried, now, that they might have made things more difficult for Beau. At the very least, what they needed to do was, as Dairon had suggested, try to get the full scope of the story. It was very clear she was there against her will, and yet it seemed unrealistic to think that they had broken her already.

Beau was made of stronger stuff than that.

As Fjord had suspect, the rest of the group were overcome with concern when he told them what had happened. Immediately after he had finished, before they had even discussed what they were going to say, Jester had _Sent _a message.

‘Beau, what’s going on?’ Jester’s voice was about an octave higher than normal. ‘Fjord and Dairon said you needed to stay there, Beau what are they doing to you? Have they turned you against us? Please answer, Beau.’

Fjord had been too caught unawares by the message to have had the foresight to count the number of words Jester had used, but he had counted her messages enough to figure that it had probably been cut off somewhere in the middle.

Jester’s face was tense with fear, before suddenly relaxing. Whatever Beau’s response had been, it had clearly been enough to assuage some of that fear.

‘She says she’s staying to protect a little boy that they kidnapped,’ she said. Fjord felt a wave of his own relief wash over him. It wasn’t the best news, but it was better than the possibility that Beau had been broken.

‘Kidnapping kids?’ Molly asked, sounding horrified. ‘Gods, her family can eat a bag of dicks.’

‘Do not reply,’ Dairon said to Jester, shortly. The elf had been sitting there silently for the conversation so far. ‘We need to ensure that our messages have sufficient content to be of use.’

Fjord frowned. Like Beau, he was sure that Dairon wasn’t _trying_ to be...well unpleasant. They were just direct.

As a group, they spent the next few minutes crafting a message. Fjord approved of the first part of the message – telling Beau that they’d get back to her with a plan – but was a little uneasy about the second – asking her to do reconnaissance. He got the impression that this wasn’t the sort of place where she could get away with snooping around.

‘We will make plans, try and figure out how to get you out of there. Dairon wants you to do some reconnaissance, but stay safe.’ Jester’s words were stilted as she read them off the scrap of parchment.

There was a moment of silence. Jester closed her eyes, and bit her lip.

‘She says she’s only seen four of them, but she can go do some reconnaissance.’ Jester pronounced the last word with a flourish. ‘So what _is_ our plan.’ She looked expectantly towards Dairon, who did not look particularly optimistic.

‘I do not feel comfortable making a plan without knowing the extent of your capabilities,’ she told them. ‘Perhaps if you could make a list of all your skills and abilities, I may be able to come up with something, but I am more of an infiltrator than a strategist.’

‘Can you infiltrate?’

‘I can change my appearance,’ Dairon admitted, ‘But given that they have now already smelled me, I do not think that would be very successful.’

‘We could go find some pheromones,’ Molly suggested. ‘Make you smell like someone else?’

Nobody seemed particularly enamored of this idea. They all had enough experience with knowing just how_..._well..._off_ pheromones smelled.

Dairon left them to their devices, and went off to go do pull-ups, or whatever it was that badass monks of the Cobalt Soul did when they were frustrated with the friends of the person they were trying to rescue.

Jester tore several pages from her sketchbook, and they spent the better part of the evening making a comprehensive list, which somehow still got them arguing (“Wait, you can turn invisible, right?” “How long have you known me? I have never turned invisible in my life.”). Caleb had been very reluctant to put all of his skills out in the open, but did so when reminded the reason that they needed to know.

‘You can do that thing with your wings, right?’ Fjord asked Yasha, as he scrawled the barbarian’s name down near the bottom of the piece of parchment. ‘What do you call that?’

Yasha frowned. ‘I don’t know? I don’t know the names for things, I just do them.’ Fjord shrugged, and wrote down _scary wings_.

Caduceus was making dinner over the fire when Dairon returned, the same expression on her face that Beau usually had after beating up a tree. A short-lived sort of relaxation.

Caduceus handed Dairon a bowl of vegetable stew, which they accepted, a little startled, but seemingly grateful. Fjord handed her the list. She read the list before she even picked up her spoon.

A few times, they raised their eyebrows, but made no comment until folding the piece of parchment, and pocketing it. ‘And you are all were-creatures?’ There was the slightest hint of...Fjord couldn’t tell if it was skepticism of mistrust in her voice.

‘All except Caleb,’ Nott said, warily. Clearly, she had noticed it – whatever it was – too. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No.’ Dairon ran a hand through...well, it would have been through her hair, if she’d had any, but instead, she ran it across her scalp. ‘But we may be able to use it. You are a rat, yes? You can get into small spaces?’

‘I could also go,’ Caleb offered. ‘There is some advantage in that, as they do not know my smell. I could be a spider.’

Fjord had to admit, he was a little surprised by Caleb volunteering. Not that Caleb was selfish, but his interests were mostly focused on keeping himself and Nott safe. So maybe it wasn’t that surprising.

‘They likely smelled you around the g—around Fjord’s neck,’ Dairon said, in a tired sort of voice. Fjord was pretty sure she’d been about to say “the green one,” but she was trying, so he let it slide. It wouldn’t do for Beau to come back and find out that her entire party had been murdered by her mentor.

They discussed plans until well after midnight. Fjord was sure he was not alone in noticing Yasha growing more and more anxious, the longer it took to come up with viable options. The fact of the matter was, there was no stealthy way to infiltrate a house with a couple of dozen shapeshifters and guards without leading to loss of life. More than likely _their_ life.

Jester, he noticed, had been about to get up. ‘I’ll do it,’ he told her, softly. It had been him who had insisted to Yasha that Beau was okay. Somehow, he felt the assurances would mean more if they came from him. ‘Hey Yasha, want to take a walk?’

Yasha looked more than a little startled, and Fjord didn’t blame her. They’d never really been close, after all. Not in the same way that other members of the group were close. Yasha...well, Fjord had always been a little wary of her. He’d spent so much of his life on ships, in close quarters with friends and compatriots; people that ran off with no warning for no conceivable reason didn’t exactly sit well with him.

But, Yasha had proven herself to be a valuable ally, and Fjord was at least somewhat willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

‘She’s going to be okay,’ he said, once they’d gotten a decent distance away from the rest of the group. He wasn’t sure if he believed his own words, but they were words that Yasha needed to hear.

‘You don’t know that,’ she said. ‘If her family are anything like my tribe, then they will torture her, and they will kill her, and they will feel no remorse.’

Fjord was momentarily speechless. He had no idea how to respond to that casual revelation. He had known Yasha’s childhood had been turbulent, but that was no small thing to drop on someone.

‘We will do whatever it takes,’ he said. Yasha did not seem altogether reassured by his words, but she was at the very least not shifting on the spot, and charging back towards Kamordah. She definitely wasn’t the only one that wanted to. Jester probably would have joined her, and strangely enough, Molly probably would have too.

They didn’t charge.

They managed a few hours of fitful sleep; Fjord was woken near dawn by Caleb to take over on watch.

He watched with Caduceus in silence for forty five minutes. The firbolg was a silent, yet somehow comforting presence. He gave Fjord a strange sort of strength.

Then, when the sun was just piercing the sky, Fjord noticed in the distance someone running towards them. Caduceus seemed to have noticed a full minute or so ahead of him, but decided that it was not a threat.

The figure became clearer, and Fjord realized that it was a teenage boy, unarmed, and unarmored. He came upon their camp, breathless. ‘Are you Mister Fjord?’ he asked, not noticing Fjord’s hand out ready to summon the sword.

‘I am,’ Fjord said, warily.

‘My boss told me to come and find you,’ he said. ‘To tell you that something’s happening up at the Estate, said there’d be gold in it.’

Fjord felt his entire body straighten. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. ‘What are they doing.’

The boy shook his head. ‘We’re not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘But it looks like they’re getting ready for a hunt.’


	17. Seventeen

Seventeen

‘How can you tell?’ demanded Molly, and Fjord started. The rest of the Mighty Nein had woken on the approach of the teen, and he hadn’t even noticed. Jester and Nott, still in their bedrolls, were staring up in a horrified sort of silence. Yasha, predictably, had already gotten to her feet. Fjord half suspected she had already been awake anyway. Dairon was a little way away, but she too was standing, her arms crossed and eyes narrowed.

The boy suddenly looked a little concerned at all the people looking at him. ‘Well,’ he said, nervously. ‘They always put the message out, telling us to board up our doors and windows, telling us not to harbor strangers on pain of death. They don’t want their...victims hiding in town.’ There was a pause. ‘Not that they ever do.’

Fjord nodded. ‘Thank-you very much for telling us,’ he said. He went to his bag, and pulled out his coin purse. ‘If I might ask just one further question...What time do these hunts usually start?’

‘Around dusk,’ the boy told him. The fact that he had these answers so readily….Fjord didn’t want to think about how many hunts the Lionett family had had, how many times in Beau’s life they had already done this to her. ‘They have a feast up at the Estate, and then, they uh...open the cage.’

Fjord gave the kid another hundred or so gold, and sent him on his way. Then, he looked around to the rest of the group. Jester looked terrified. Yasha was fuming. Dairon...Dairon looked _relaxed_.

Caduceus gave them a look. It was a withering sort of look that Fjord had not seen from the firbolg in the short time that they’d known each other. ‘Would you like to share with the rest of us?’

Dairon lifted their head in a slight nod. ‘This is the best thing that could have happened,’ they said.

‘How the fuck it is a good thing!’ Jester demanded, jumping to her feet. Beside Fjord, Yasha was gripping her sword tightly. ‘They’re going to kill her!’

‘Yes, but she will be outside of the house. They will all be scattered. We have a much greater chance at taking them one on one than we do when their defenses are up. It is not full moon, which means you will all have full access to your magic, and your most powerful abilities, whereas they will be relying on their claws.’ Dairon gave a slight snort. ‘Their pride will be their downfall.’ The pun had clearly not been intended, but Molly seemed to smirk anyway.

Dairon looked them all over, an almost insulted look on her face. ‘My _only_ goal is Beauregard’s safety. You would do well to remember.’ Fjord was still wary. They all were. But, they needed the help, and if there was one thing that Fjord_ was_ sure of was that Dairon absolutely wanted to help save Beau’s life.

‘Send Beau a message,’ they instructed Jester. ‘Tell her to head north if she can, and we will pick off those hunting her, one by one, from a distance.’ She gave Nott a look. ‘You can shoot in the dark, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Nott said, eyes narrowed in disdain. Fjord didn’t think that Dairon had intended to sound so...condescending. In general. It was ironic, seeing as how the person most on Dairon’s level, the one that would have been able to cut through the directness, was the one person that wasn’t here. Still, Fjord didn’t disagree with her plan.

‘If we drive them up into the hills, then it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone ‘cept Yasha and Molly can fight from a distance, then they can take care of any stragglers.’

Caleb, who had been quiet up until that point, suddenly spoke. ‘I have spotted a few problems with this plan,’ he said. His voice was soft, and a little strained.

‘I think there are no shortage of problems with it,’ Dairon admitted. ‘It is not perfect, but then, we have limited options.’

‘Yes,’ Caleb agreed. ‘The problem that I am referring to, though, is that they will no doubt be expecting us. We did not exactly make our presence in Kamordah a secret.’

‘But they will not know how many of us there are.’ Fjord was surprised to see that it was Yasha that was interjecting. Not that she didn’t contribute to strategy meetings. It was just the look on her face had been one of such intense anger, that he didn’t think she would be interested. ‘Molly, Caduceus and I did not go anywhere near that house. They may not have connected Nott and Jester to your presence.’

Fjord was skeptical, but said nothing. He was pretty sure that the presence of two intruders right at the time a couple of Cobalt Soul operatives showed up at the front door would not be explained away as coincidence.

‘Send the message,’ he told Jester, who seemed to be waiting for confirmation from someone other than Dairon. ‘We can circle around Kamordah and get into position before sunset. Unless someone else has a better plan?’

No-one said anything.

Jester closed her eyes. ‘Hey Beau, it’s Jester. We know what they’re going to do, so head north when...when it happens, and we’ll be there waiting. Please be safe.’ Jester seemed to falter in the middle of the message, but to Fjord’s surprise, she managed to get it all in. There was a few moments of pained silence, before Jester gave a tiny gasp, and tears sprung to her eyes. Before Fjord could even ask, Jester was sending another message.

‘Beau, no, no, no, don’t give up, we are coming to get you, it’s all gonna be okay. We love you, and we’re gonna kill them all!’

Fjord’s stomach seemed to seize up, and he barely had the presence of mind to put an arm out to stop Yasha from charging forward.

Jester closed her eyes, waiting for a response. She hitched her breath slightly, and opened her eyes. ‘She says “oh wow, I’m super glad you’re coming to get me, I’m really grateful, and also, Yasha is really sexy—”’

‘Jester,’ Fjord said, in a tired sort of voice. He knew that Jester was trying to protect them (or maybe even protect herself) the same way she always did when she got a message she didn’t particularly like.

‘She didn’t answer,’ Jester said, in a miserable sort of voice, when she finally acquiesced to Fjord’s look. ‘I just heard breathing...I...I think she was crying.’

Yasha made to move again immediately. Before Fjord could even say anything, Dairon had spoken. ‘Yasha!’ they said. ‘If we go in there now, they will almost certainly kill Beauregard. I think you want that even less than I do.’

The words cut through all of them like a knife through butter. To Fjord’s surprise, Yasha did not argue. She seemed sort of frozen. Finally, though, she sheathed her sword, and gave Dairon a look of utter contempt. Dairon gave an acknowledging sort of shrug. She was clearly used to this sort of response from people.

They packed up their camp, and headed north, skirting a very, very wide path around the Lionett estate. Even still, they moved as quietly as possible; it was hard to tell just what kind of eyes were out there, watching them.

One way or the other, tonight was going to end in bloodshed.

* * *

Beau stared at the ground.

She had spent the last hour or so alternating between staring at the ground, staring at the ceiling, and staring at the wall. There was precious little else to do, save for the one thing she desperately didn’t want to do; thinking about the night ahead.

After everything, she hadn’t expected to die this way. She had thought she’d escaped them, once and for all.

Now, she was sitting in the basement dungeon, wrists and ankles cuffed, waiting to be led away to die.

Not even that. _Worse _than that. Waiting to be led away to be hunted to death. She was not so naive to think that they would let her live. They were just doing what they always did. _Playing_ with her. Letting her think that maybe there was a chance she could make it out alive. They would give her a pitiful head start, before tracking her down, and tearing her apart. This time, they wouldn’t offer her the dignity of stopping before she bled out. If the Mighty Nein ever found her body, it would be in pieces.

How foolish she had been, thinking that maybe her friends could save her. Thinking that maybe, her life, her destiny”, every single facet of her existence wasn’t under _their_ control. Since the day she was born, she had only ever been for their entertainment.

At least, after tonight, they’d have to find some other way to get their kicks. The main thing that bothered her about that was knowing that she had been unable to save the innocent kid that they’d roped into her bullshit. Maybe the Mighty Nein would be able to save him, even if they couldn’t save her.

She couldn’t even tell what time of day it was, to figure out just how long she had left. Her memory of the time after running into her father and her uncle was a little hazy. She was sporting fresh wounds on her face, and there were a couple of ribs that might have been at least cracked. Her head was pounding. The yellow dress, once new and clean, was now stained with blood. That was one more insult, forcing her to die in this stupid thing. She’d dozed off a couple of times since returning (probably not a great idea with a head wound, but she hadn’t exactly been cognizant enough to stop it), so how long she actually had left, she had no idea. It could have been hours, or it could have been minutes.

There was another sharp pain in her head, this time accompanied by a message. Beau hadn’t dared hope that they would message her, and felt a tension release. ‘_Hey Beau, it’s Jester. We know what they’re going to do, so head north when...when it happens, and we’ll be there waiting. Please be safe._’

Something in the words overwhelmed Beau, to the point of tears. Within seconds, her whole body was wracked with them. She couldn’t lead her friends to their deaths. Couldn’t risk that they would die as a result of her foolishness. When she replied, her words were consumed with the pain and the exhaustion that had overtaken her.

‘Jes, listen. You guys need to get the fuck out of here. They’re gonna kill you all. Don’t worry about me, I...I love you guys. Thank-you for everything.’ Her family had taken everything from her. She wouldn’t let them take her friends, too.

As Beau had known it would be, Jester’s reply was sudden, and panicked. ‘_Beau, no, no, no, don’t give up, we are coming to get you, it’s all gonna be okay. We love you, and we’re gonna kill—_’

That was it. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Beau had no strength, no will left...She gasped for air, trying to get a hold of herself. Her heart beat faster, and she could not stop the tears springing from her eyes.

Her breath came in gasping sobs, and her ribs ached with the pain of trying to breathe. It was nothing compared to the pain that she would endure later, that old familiar friend of teeth and claws and heart pounding as she ran for her life.

She was going to die, and not even her friends could save her.


	18. Eighteen

Eighteen

In the cold of the night, Beau shivered.

Her family had been kind enough to let her wear her travel clothes, rather than the yellow dress, but she knew that was only because the travel clothes carried more of her scent, and would make her easier to track. Her cloak, though, was mysteriously missing, leaving her arms, and her stomach, and half her legs exposed to the winter air.

She was kneeling on the icy cold ground. 

Waiting.

She had always thought that her death would be a little more auspicious. A little more dignified than being hunted like a wild animal.

There was a guard on either side of her, swords at the ready. They weren’t lions, and wouldn’t take part in the hunt, but then, they didn’t need to be lions to be able to stab her through the gut if she made a wrong move. Part of her was a little tempted. At least then, it would be quick.

But no. There was someone else that was relying on her to make it out of this alive. If she died, then that poor kid would spend the rest of his life stuck in the clutches of a family of evil assholes. Worse than that, he would turn into an evil asshole, and that was a fate that no-one deserved.

One such evil asshole was standing in front of her, an amused sort of look on his face. ‘You always did provide good entertainment, little mouse,’ her uncle said. Beau ignored him. He was looking to get a rise out of her, and she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

This, though, seemed to annoy him just as much, and he whacked her across the back of the head. He gave a satisfied smirk when Beau grunted in pain.

There was another twenty or so minutes of silence, until, without warning, Beau was yanked to her feet. She hadn’t heard any signal, so she assumed there must have been magic involved.

A silver knife clattered to the ground in front of Beau. Her uncle gave her a lecherous grin. ‘We all want to make sure this is a fair fight.’

Beau sneered at him. ‘Fair fight? Go fuck yourself. Thirteen against one isn’t a fair fight.’ Nonetheless, she bent over to pick up the knife, and was kicked sprawling to the ground. She didn’t want to get up, but Bartholomew’s next words at the very least made her look upwards, tears hopefully masked by the darkness.

‘Fourteen, actually.’ He nodded over to where Beau’s father stood, a hand on the shoulder of a young boy. Beau froze.

The poor kid looked fucking terrified. The responsible thing for Beau to do would be to provide reassurance. To give him a friendly look, and let him know that everything would be okay.

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t lie to him.

‘He can have the first bite,’ her father said. He looked down at the boy.

‘Come on now, Timothy. Just like we practiced.’

The boy gave Beau a terrified look, and closed his eyes. He clenched his fists, and bit his lip, as though he was concentrating hard. Concentrating, she knew, on trying to shift.

It was a difficult thing to learn, she’d heard, shifting outside of the full moon. Even experienced weres sometimes took years to figure it out. Heightened emotional states generally helped, and there was nothing about this that wasn’t a heightened emotional state.

Even still, the kid was eight fucking years old, and already traumatized. Beau would have been impressed if he’d managed it. 

Uncle Bartholomew laughed, and Beau wanted to punch him. She had the silver knife in her hand.

He wasn’t paying attention.

It took half a second of courage to swing the knife upwards and slice across his neck. He gasped, clutching at the wound, pouring with blood. He tried to speak, to cast a spell, but couldn’t seem to get the words out.

At least he had stopped laughing.

Beau turned on her father, knife clutched tightly in her hand. She was vaguely aware of the fact that she was covered in blood. The guards had turned towards her, swords ready to strike. They looked to her father for an order that did not come.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ came a voice from right behind Beau. A shiver ran up her spine as a cold hand touched her shoulder. 

Mother.

Beau didn’t dare drop the knife, but she made no move to attack anyone else, either.

Her mother gave an airy sort of laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t think anyone will miss Bartholomew too much. He was a bit of a bore. Not to mention creepy.’ As casually as if she was spreading marmalade on her toast, she stroked Beau’s cheek. Beau didn’t dare look down at the barely twitching body on the ground.

She clenched her fist. The blade of the knife cut into her palm. The mere touch of her mother’s hand against her cheek made her want to throw up, and yet she relished it.  _Yearned_ for it. If she closed her eyes and tried not to think, she could almost pretend that she had a normal life, a family that loved her. A family that didn’t want to kill her.

‘Don’t worry Beauregard,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll be over soon.’

The words were like a knife in her chest. How often had she heard those words from her mother growing up. Month after month she would beg, and plead for them to leave her alone, and mother would plaster on that fake smile, and lie through her teeth.

It wouldn’t be over soon.

It would never be over.

Even if she survived the night, the memory would live on in her nightmares, in her memories, in the scars etched on her skin.

Beau’s attention was jerked away from her mother by the sound of a scream. Benjamin was on the ground, writhing. Automatically, Beau moved to go towards him, but she was held back by a rough grip on her shoulder. ‘You can’t help him,’ mother said, coldly. She wasn’t wrong. Beau couldn’t even help herself, let alone anyone else.

Like a coward, she closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she saw, instead of a young boy, a juvenile lion, a decent amount smaller than any other lion in the family, but with the same tawny fur, though it was patchy in places. 

The lion snarled, first at the human standing next to him, then at the two standing in front of him. He didn’t look particularly tame, but then, they never did at first. It took a long while for people to gain control over their were form.

‘He looks hungry,’ Mother whispered. Beau’s heart clenched in her chest. ‘I would run if I were you. Your father won’t be able to hold him back forever.’

Beau didn’t move. She couldn’t move.

_Go_ , said a voice in her head, and finally, she ran. She didn’t stop to look back, or to wonder if they were going to follow. They would not give her the luxury of waiting for her to get her shit together. Fifteen minutes, the family had told her. The second those fifteen minutes were up, they would be on her like flies on shit.

_North_ , they had said.  _Go north._

Beau knew the area pretty well. There was a path up through the mountains that led to Pride’s Call. She had very rarely used it in previous hunts because it was effectively a deathtrap; a narrow path surrounded by high canyons. Once upon a time it had been used to transport wine and silk in between Kamordah and Pride’s Call, but since her family had all but taken over the town, that sort of trade had fallen to the wayside. They still traded, of course; one had to make a living after all. They just didn’t trade with Pride’s Call. At least, they hadn’t the last time Beau had been here.

She doubted whether the Mighty Nein had known about the path when telling her to go north, but it  _was_ a pretty good spot for an ambush.  Even if her family did suspect that she had help out there, there was no way they could have known that Jester had been sending Beau messages the entire time she’d been in captivity.

S till, she hoped that the Mighty Nein were well hidden,  and, more to the point, that her family were so focused on finding her that they didn’t notice the bunch of people waiting to pick them off, one by one.

Beau circled around the back of the house, through the vineyards. It was dark and quiet here. Generally during a hunt, the halfling workers were forbidden from leaving their lodgings; a three-storey building with pretty paltry accommodations. The Lionetts didn’t treat their workers any better than they treated estranged, disgraced, unwanted children.

Beau tripped over a vine as she ran, landing heavily on an arm that was already not in great shape. Swearing, she pulled herself to standing, and kept running. There was no time to commiserate, no time to lick her wounds, no time to even think. In the distance behind her, she could hear the roaring howls.

Beau had never seen an actual lion in her life. She didn’t know if they roared, or howled, or played the fucking trumpet. The lions that she knew were sadistic, dramatic creatures. Never ones to miss an opportunity to let everyone within five miles hear what was going on.

Tonight, though, it was a blessing in disguise. Within seconds of the sound, Beau heard the voice in her head.

_Beau, we heard the roaring, are you on your way?_

The message was short. Far shorter than any message that Beau had ever heard Jester send, which was no doubt a testament to the urgency of the situation. She was speaking in a loud whisper, though it hardly mattered. Even as humans, her family had supernatural senses. Both Jester and Caduceus had access to _Silence _spells, she knew, but they had a limited duration. Plus, not even magic could stop the smell from getting out there.

‘Uh...like…ten minutes off, I think,’ Beau said. She had to make her way through scrub-land, scramble up the side of the mountain, and double back around to the path. It might take ten minutes, but it could buy her twenty, so it was worth it.

She ran through the trees, faster than she had ever run in her life. Her lungs were burning, but she didn’t dare slow down. Branches pulled at her clothes, scraped at her arms and legs, but the tiny cuts were nothing compared to what would find her if she stopped.

It was only when she reached the mountainside that she saw it. Flashes of red, and green, and gold up past the peak ahead.

_No!_

‘Jester,’ Beau muttered, and put on a rush of speed. If only she had some kind of magic to talk to them, to ask them what was happening. Her legs were on fire. Her head was pounding. Her friends were in danger.

She clutched the knife.

Behind her, the trees shook with a lion’s roar.


	19. Nineteen

Nineteen

Minute by minute, the sun edged closer to the horizon. 

They had made pretty good time in getting to the canyon north of Kamordah, and were holed up in amongst a series of volcanic boulders, waiting for the sun to set. Once they were under the cover of darkness, they would set up along the ridge, and wait.

Dairon, surprisingly, had agreed to take watch, but Fjord was pretty sure that was mostly just so they could get away from the Mighty Nein. She mostly seemed to prefer her own company.

Of the rest of the group, there wasn’t a single one of them that was in any way relaxed. The closest was probably Caduceus, who was sitting against a rock, communing with his goddess.

Yasha was pacing, sword drawn, as though waiting for a slightly confused were-lion to wander into their mist. The others were in various places along that spectrum. Jester had insisted that Molly give a tarot reading, in order to ensure Beau’s safety.

Molly raised an eyebrow, and Fjord was almost entirely certain that tarot didn’t work like that, but Molly dutifully pulled his cards out nonetheless, and dealt out. Fjord couldn’t tell if he was actually being sincere, but was curious enough to listen in anyway.

‘—the Chariot,’ Molly was saying. ‘Indicates success and triumph over that which ails us.’ Somehow, his words seemed to bring Jester some small relief, and whatever ribbing Fjord might have been thinking about giving Molly, he decided to hold back on it.

Off in the distance, Caleb and Nott were talking. They did a lot of that; keeping themselves a little closed off from the rest of the group, even after everything.

To Fjord’s surprise, Caleb looked up, and, seeing him staring in their direction, gestured him over. In lieu of anything else to do, Fjord went over. He didn’t sit, instead leaned against the rock, waiting for Caleb to say whatever it was that he wanted to say. Nott looked on, clearly comfortable with Caleb taking the lead on this.

‘I have had a thought,’ Caleb said, looking like he was very much going to regret what he was about to say. Fjord stared at him. It seemed a little late to be changing the plan. ‘Our goal was to pick off the lions as they came through the canyon. That leaves Beauregard still in a very vulnerable position.’

Fjord didn’t disagree. He had thought of that himself, but hadn’t figured out a solution beyond “confuse the enemy”.

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘We should draw some of them a little way away,’ he said. ‘And take them out quietly.’ He gestured towards Nott. Fjord had to admit, that wasn’t a bad idea; Nott was pretty fucking deadly when no-one knew she was coming. If they could get a bunch of the lions up here, there was a decent chance they might be able to take a few away from the hunt, and give Beau a better chance at getting further away.

‘It will put us at risk,’ Fjord said. Not that he particularly minded. He was pretty sure he would risk his life for any other person in this group, save, of course, probably Dairon. He just wanted to see what Caleb’s response to that would be.

‘_Ja_,’ Caleb said, frowning. He looked back down at Nott. Fjord realized, suddenly, that it had probably been Nott’s idea. That intrigued him. He hadn’t considered Beau and Nott to be that close. ‘I think that is a risk that most of us are willing to take.’

There was a beat of silence.

‘Alright,’ Fjord said. ‘Let’s go tell the others, then.’

…

They were gaining on her.

They were close. They were so fucking close, and the canyon was still an age away.

Okay, it was about a hundred feet away, but it might as well have been a thousand feet. She could hear galloping (did lions gallop?) footsteps behind her, though far fewer than she would have expected. 

That might’ve had something to do with the flashes of magic she’d seen up on the canyon. Her worst fears had been realized; instead of her friends helping her escape, she had led them into a trap. Perhaps she should just stop, just let the rest of them catch up, and kill her. It would be easier. It would be safer for her friends.

But no.

She was not yet so defeated that she would let herself die without doing anything possible to save that fucking kid. The kid that was a hundred feet behind her, and gaining.

He wasn’t alone.

There was at least one other lion with him; Beau couldn’t hear the sound of paws, but she could hear the adult-lion roars, mocking her, taunting her.

‘Get down!’ she hears a voice from above her, barely louder than the pounding in her ears, barely louder than the beat of her heart.

Beau gets down, too late remembering that she hadn’t told her friends about the innocent in the lions’ midst. ‘Wait!’ she yelled, but Caleb had already sent the ball of fire screaming above her head, so low that she could have sworn it singed her hair on the way past.

Beau closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears against the screams. Hot wet tears fell down her face.

The forest was burning.

Beau rolled over onto her back, just in time to see the fully grown lion leaping in her direction. It had vaguely human features, as though it had only transformed part way. Beau could see bright blue eyes shining in the light of the fire.

Mother.

It was weird. How something she had her lion eyes in human form, or her human eyes in lion form. Generally it was an indication that she hadn’t quite transformed all the way, that she wanted some part of her human brain to savor the experience.

Beau crawled backwards, trying to scramble to her feet, but not wanting to take her eyes off the lion. More than any of the others, Mother had always enjoyed the hunting part of this. Enjoyed stalking through the forest, tracking using smell. Enjoyed toying with Beau.

She looked almost disappointed, and frankly, Beau was a little disappointed too. She hadn’t even lasted an hour.

She was getting rusty.

The lion snarled, and paced. An angry red burn marked her side. Beau wanted to look past her mother, to see if the kid had survived the  _Fireball_ , but she didn’t dare turn away.

Her hand gripped the knife. 

_Do it! _ screamed the voice in her head. She hesitated.

She would have had no qualms about killing her father, who had been unfailingly cruel. Her mother, though. Her mother, who had alternated between being kind, and being psychopathic. Between being warm, and being cold. Between love, and hate.

It was stupid.

To feel a longing for something you had never had, or something that you only ever saw bits and pieces of. It had taken Beau far too long to realize that her mother’s love should not have been conditional, and even still, she sometimes had doubts. Because when your childhood was just a giant bucket of shit, you sort of learned to hold on to the bits that didn’t suck so much, like when Mother braided your hair, or, or…

_Holy fuck snap out of it_ .

Beau lunged forward, aiming the knife towards her mother’s bared belly. She wasn’t sure if her mother hadn’t been expecting it, or if – and this was probably the more likely option – she hadn’t actually expected Beau to go through with it.

It was funny. Once upon a time, she’d been weak. Once upon a time, she’d been a coward, who submitted to their attacks without fighting back, because it would at least be less pain than what followed.

That Beauregard had died the moment they’d sent her away. The moment they had pushed her out into a world where she could meet new people, learn new things. The moment they had put her under the tutelage of a place that literally advocated for self-discovery and learning. The moment she had run away and met a group of people who showed her the value in fighting for what you loved.

The knife pierced flesh, and a horrifying scream rent the air. Far worse than the screams that had accompanied Caleb’s  _Fireball_ .

The wound was not close to Mother’s heart (not that Beau was entirely sure her mother even  _had _ a heart), but that was the thing about silver. 

It didn’t take much.

The lion collapsed on top of Beau, crushing her into the ground. The lion writhed in pain, howling, screaming, claws swiping at nothing in the attempts to make it all stop. Beau took a claw to the chest and the face, even as she tried to roll out of the way.

‘Beauregard,’ came her mother’s voice. Weak. Pitiful. The lion had half shifted back into human form, human hands clutching at a blood-soaked, furred belly. ‘Beau—’ The words died on her lips.

Beau tried to push the body off of her, but she had no strength left in her, and no leverage to be able to maneuver her arms. She could feel the blood from the wound soaking her clothes, could feel her own heart pounding.

Another snarl came – a furious, apoplectic thing of rage. Beau had no trouble recognizing this lion. The lion that had spent so many nights (full moon or otherwise) terrorizing her, beating her, neglecting her. The man that she had so often fantasized about killing. The man that shared not even a single drop of blood with her, and yet insisted on controlling her life.

Unlike his wife, Beau’s father did not bother with keeping any vestiges of his human form. He was almost nine feet long, and had powerful claws that could tear a human being in half. He pushed the body away as though it weighed nothing more than a cardboard box. Whether or not he felt grief, Beau didn’t know; in this moment, all she could see was rage.

She was lying there, waiting to die.

Couldn’t move, couldn’t breath. Was frozen in place. He was going to gut her with his claws like he had so many times before, and then tear her apart with his teeth. If the kid had survived, maybe he’d tear into her, too.

It took Beau several seconds to realize that she wasn’t dead yet, and several more to figure out why. A sword-wielding figure had joined the fray, six feet tall, and raging. Her body and her sword dripping with blood, her mouth open in a scream that Beau could not hear.

Yasha.

There were bright flashes of light all around her, the telltale sign of spells hitting their targets, but Beau only had eyes for Yasha.

A wave of courage rose inside of her. She got to her feet, and pulled the knife from her mother’s body.

Blood dripped into her eyes, and she didn’t bother to wipe it away.

Without even stopping to think, she ran into the fray, stabbing in the direction of the feral beast. She had thrust the knife three, four, five times, before she heard someone calling her name.

‘Beauregard!’

The voice sounded like it was coming from very far away, but Beau wouldn’t let it distract her. _Couldn’t_ let it distract her. She had to save herself. Had to save Benjamin.

Then, as suddenly as she had started stabbing, she found that she had to stop. Someone had taken the knife from her hand. Beau looked up, frowning, to see Yasha holding the blade in her hand, ignoring the sizzle of her flesh.

‘Beauregard,’ she said, voice clear as day. Beau realized that it had been Yasha’s voice that she’d heard. She looked into those beautiful heterochromatic eyes. ‘He’s dead.’

Beau looked down and saw the lion’s corpse, littered with knife wounds. Beau couldn’t tell whether they, or the very long, very deep sword wounds were responsible for his death.

‘I need—’ Beau started. She made to stand up, but then her whole body collapsed beneath her. Yasha dropped the knife, and caught Beau before she hit the ground. ‘Jester.’

‘You’ll be okay,’ Yasha said. As though to demonstrate this, she put a hand to Beau’s chest, and Beau felt a strange warmth course through her body.

‘No.’ Beau shook her head. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Not me. The kid.’ Fuck! She tried to get to her feet again, but felt her body rebel against her. ‘You need to save him, Yasha!’ The darkness was closing in on her, and there was nothing she could do to stop the panic rising.

Only one thing seemed to matter. ‘You need to save him!’


	20. Twenty

Twenty

There was light in the world, but Beau couldn’t see it. Her vision was blurred, and everything was spinning, and she could barely seem to see what was happening in front of her. Her heart beat was like a hummingbird’s wings. There was a soft breeze, which made Beau’s hair fall across her face, but she couldn’t find the strength to brush it away.

‘The boy, yes?’ Yasha said. ‘He is...Caduceus is looking after him.’

Beau wanted to get up.  _Needed _ to get up and make sure he was okay. ‘Let’s go a little way away,’ Yasha said. Beau looked down, and realized that they were still standing next to her parents’ bodies. Numbly, she let Yasha lead her away. She could hear things around her, but her hearing somehow felt as blurred as her vision. ‘Is he dead?’

Yasha hesitated, and Beau knew immediately, then, that the answer was yes. ‘Do they have a diamond?’

‘Yes,’ Yasha said, apparently to both questions. She was never one for lying. Not least of all because she was terrible at it. ‘Caduceus is looking after him,’ she said again.

Beau’s lips were dry. She licked them, experimentally. ‘Is Caleb okay?’ She had seen Caleb freak out before, after killing people with fire. She didn’t want to think about he might have reacted to accidentally killing an innocent kid.

‘Nott is with him.’

Beau nodded. ‘Good,’ she said. Everything still felt very far away. Like she was floating somewhere in between life and death.

‘Beau?’ came a voice, and Beau couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from. Then, a little stronger, a little closer. It was Dairon’s face swimming in front of her. ‘Beauregard. Can you count to five for me?’

Beau was vaguely aware of what was happening, and in that moment, nothing seemed more important than counting to five. She nodded. ‘One,’ she said. ‘Two.’ Her heart slowed down just a touch. ‘Three.’ Her breathing started to ease. ‘Four.’ The world came into a clearer sort of focus. ‘Five.’

‘Good.’ Dairon nodded. ‘Tell me five things that you can see.’

Beau’s voice caught in her throat. ‘You,’ she said. ‘My-Yasha. Trees. Grass. Blood.’ Shit. Probably shouldn’t have said the last one. Still, she remembered how this went. What came next? ‘I can feel...the beating of my heart, Yasha’s hand on my shoulder. The ground underneath me.’ She struggled to think of a fourth one that wasn’t morbid as fuck. ‘The air on my face.’

‘I can hear...birds overhead. Breathing…Leaves rustling.’ A long pause. ‘I can smell...’ Her eyes snapped open. ‘Holy fuck, you all smell like shit.’

And just like that, the tension broke. She felt something close to herself again. Still felt like shit, of course, but was slightly aware of it. In front of her, Dairon was smiling. ‘May I hug you?’

Beau was startled by the question. Not by the fact that Dairon had bothered to ask, but moreso...well, she’d never really considered Dairon to be the sort of person interested in hugs. She realized suddenly, that there were tears drying on Dairon’s face. Beau didn’t bother to answer, and simply pulled Dairon in for a hug. It was strange. It felt almost...maternal. Not that she’d ever consider calling Dairon a mother figure. More that...she’d never really got this kind of affection from that place. Not in a way that didn’t have a fuckton of strings and baggage attached. A warmth and security that she felt like she’d been missing her whole life.

‘I fear that if I monopolize your presence any longer, your friends may kill me,’ Dairon said, when she finally pulled away. There was a slight smile playing on her lips, even past the drying tears. She stood back, and let everyone else move forward.

Beau blinked, and realized that they were all there, now. At some point, during her...well, panic attack, for lack of a better word, Caleb and Nott had joined them, Caleb still looking very distressed. His eyes darted between Beau and Caduceus, who was standing close by at the shoulder of a very shell-shocked boy.

As much as Beau wanted more than anything to be held, to be told that everything was going to be okay, she had to be the strong one now, for just a few more minutes. ‘Hey,’ she said, whole body shaking through a smile. Benjamin’s lip quavered, and he burst into tears, before running and wrapping his arms around Beau. She hadn’t quite been expecting this level of response, but it was kind of nice just the same.

‘I want to go home,’ he murmured, sobbing even as he put his head against Beau’s shoulder. Beau bit her lip and nodded.

‘We’re going to take you home,’ she told him. Then, she gave a breathy chuckle. Her next words were to herself as much as they were to him. ‘You get to go home.’

…

Dairon stayed behind to deal with the mess of bodies and...everything else that was Kamordah. ‘What do you want done with the estate?’ they asked, and Beau stared. She hadn’t even considered the fact that technically, she was the last surviving member of the family. But then again, she wasn’t, really.

‘I don’t care,’ she said. _Burn it_, said the back of her mind. ‘Turn it into the Kamordah branch of the Cobalt Soul, I don’t give a fuck.’

Dairon nodded. ‘It will be dealt with in the appropriate manner,’ she said, and Beau was almost entirely sure that it might actually burn down. She kind of wanted to hug Dairon again, but restrained herself.

‘Stay safe,’ were the only words shared between them, as the Mighty Nein departed. They made their way towards Rexxentrum, a motley crew of worn out, beaten down travelers. 

Beau remained in a haze until they reached Zadash, when all of a sudden, the world seemed to clear.

The sky was bright blue, and there were no clouds. The people of Zadash went about their business like it was a normal day, and it was. There was no-one chasing her.

She was free.

The group shared breakfast on the bottom floor of the  _Leaky Tap. _ They got a few strange looks from the other patrons, being that they were two humans, two tieflings, a half-orc, a poorly disguised goblin, whatever the hell Caduceus was, whatever the hell  _Yasha_ was, and a young boy, wolfing down an enormous platter of eggs and bacon (Caduceus abstained, ordering a very tame looking breakfast that was mostly green). The stupid thing was, there was finally actually nine of them.

A sudden thought struck Beau. The kind of thought that should have hit her days ago, but it was only just piercing the veil of every other fucked up thing that had happened.

‘The curse is broken,’ she said, to herself more than to anyone else. At first, she didn’t think anyone had heard her. Then, next to her, Jester frowned.

‘Wait, which curse? The one where you’re cursed to not be a shapeshifter? Does that mean you’ll be like us now?’

Beau shrugged. She didn’t know. She wished she could say that she didn’t care, but that wasn’t really true. If you’d asked her even a year ago, her answer would have been certain. She had spent almost all of her life utterly loathing shapeshifters. Then, she had met the Mighty Nein.

Not the greatest people, admittedly. They’d all done some questionable stuff in their time as a group, but more important than any of that was the fact that they unequivocally had Beau’s back. If she had to be a shifter...well, it wouldn’t be so bad to be a shifter like them. Time would tell, apparently.

Beau didn’t want to go into details; not with the kid sitting there. He was in markedly better spirits in the days since they had left Kamordah, and was, surprisingly, clinging to Nott far more than any of the rest of them. Maybe because she was smaller, and looked a little less intimidating than the rest of them. There was also the strangeness in the fact that Nott was acting surprisingly maternal towards him. After several attempts, and back and forths of descriptions and names, and things like that, Jester had managed to get a message to Benjamin’s frantic parents in Rexxentrum, telling them that they would be there soon.

Then, they took the Cobalt Soul’s  _Teleportation Circle_ to Rexxentrum.

‘The last time we did this, you were not looking too good,’ Yasha commented, and Beau frowned. She didn’t remember _any _of that.

Benjamin’s parents were utterly thrilled to see him; they told the story of how they had been traveling between Rexxentrum and Zadash when he’d been taken, and no-one that they talked to would dare take on the might of the Lionetts to get him back.

Just from that short conversation, Beau could tell that they were not exactly well off. She took her coin purse, and, not even bothering to count out its contents, gave it to them. Benjamin’s father stared at her, stunned.

‘Why—’ he started, clearly unable to find the words to express his gratitude. Beau shrugged. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that it was her family that had been responsible for the horrifying situation that Benjamin was now in. It was one thing to become a shapeshifter, but quite another to have it forced upon you by your captors.

Fjord and Caleb stayed behind to do the charismatic thing, to explain what had happened, and what it meant for Benjamin. Beau didn’t get the impression that the conversation had gone well. Not that she would have expected it to. She gave the kid one final wave (he insisted on running up and hugging her) before they left Rexxentrum.

‘So,’ Fjord said, once they’d left the city limits (Caleb definitely looking a decent amount calmer after they had done so). ‘What now?’ He was talking to the whole group, but Beau knew that the question was directed towards her.

She shrugged. She kind of just wanted to take it day by day, heading south. Maybe they could go back to the Menagerie Coast. She wouldn’t mind seeing the ocean again.

The full moon came when they were two days out of Rexxentrum. Beau hadn’t realized how anxious she’d been about it until it came. She sat with Caleb by the fire as the moon rose, and remained steadfastly and unerringly human. There was maybe a slight tickle beneath the skin, but she was pretty sure that was the wind, more than anything else.

Beau hadn’t yet spoken at great length about what had happened while she’d been in Kamordah, save to say thank-you. None of them had pushed her, but she could tell they were at least curious. She would tell them, when she was ready, but she definitely wasn’t ready. Not even close.

It was another three or four days after the full moon that Yasha pulled Beau aside. ‘Can we talk?’

Beau would have been lying if she said she didn’t half want this. She ignored the wink that Jester gave her, and the very rude gesture from Molly as she followed Yasha to a copse of trees a little way off the road.

Yasha didn’t speak straight away, but when she did, it was in a soft,  quavering sort of voice.  ‘I was, ah...very worried about you.’  Yasha’s eyes were downcast, not quite meeting Beau’s. ‘I am glad you are okay.’

Beau took Yasha’s hand in hers, and squeezed it. ‘I...I’m glad to be okay. Would’ve sucked to go out without finishing off my bucket list.’

There was a slight pause. ‘What…’ Yasha started, and then hesitated. ‘What is on your bucket list?’

Beau did not hesitate. She leaned in, and pressed a kiss to Yasha’s lips. There was a half second during which Yasha made a noise of surprise, before she returned the kiss.

Beau hadn’t really had an endgame plan, but now that they were kissing, it seemed a shame to stop there. Experimentally, she put a hand on Yasha’s waist, and not only did Yasha not pull away, she mirrored the gesture. Then, she wrapped a hand around the back of Beau’s neck, and pulled her in closer.

Beau could feel her heart beating faster and faster. It was exciting, and amazing, and passionate, and then...and then it suddenly became something else.

There was a strange itching under her skin, as though bugs were crawling across it, beneath it.  Her heart was pounding a thousand times a minute. This wasn’t lust. She had felt lust before. This was... She didn’t know what this was.

‘Yash—’ She started to say Yasha’s name, but it came out as a gasping breath. An agonizing pain rippled through her body, as though her skin was being turned inside out. 

‘Beau!’ Yasha pulled away, as she realized that something was definitely, _definitely_ wrong. Beau tried to say something, to explain what she was feeling, but couldn’t talk. Couldn’t breathe.

Fur started poking up on her arms, as her entire body started to shift. 

Oh.

Well, fuck.

She should have expected this, should have known this was coming, and yet...It was strange. The only thing that seemed to strike her as out of the ordinary was that the color was wrong. The fur was not the golden wheat of a lion, but darker, more...more orange.

Yasha had taken a step back. ‘Beau,’ she breathed.

Beau let out a scream, only it wasn’t a scream, it was a roar. Louder, darker, angrier than any lion’s roar she had ever heard.

That was the last thing she remembered.


	21. Twenty-One

Twenty-One

It was a lazy sort of day.

They’d had a lot of those recently; with nowhere important to be, and nothing important to do, and coming off a stint where A Lot of things had happened in a very short space of time, it was nice.

Fjord, for one, was looking forward to getting back to the coast. He didn’t hate the inland by any stretch, but there was something freeing about being by the water that you just couldn’t get when you were surrounded by land on all sides.

He accepted the steaming mug of tea that Caduceus passed him, poured from the kettle that hung over the fire. It was late in the afternoon, and they had stopped to make camp. Caleb was reading. Jester and Molly were playing some game that seemed to involve cards, stealing and cheating. Beau and Yasha had wandered off into a copse of trees, and Fjord had been forced to physically pull Nott back to stop her from following to snoop.

Beau and Yasha had been dancing around each other for months now, and he was glad it seemed like it was coming to a head. They deserved a bit of happiness.

No sooner than that thought had entered his mind, he heard the roar. Maybe it was because he still had lions on the mind, after they had killed so many of them just one week prior, but he looked up, and half expected to see a pack of them descending on the group.

What he didn’t expect to see was Nott (who had apparently run off invisible anyway), running towards him from the copse of trees, screaming, ‘Fuuuuck!’

Caleb dropped his book immediately, clearly far greater in tune with Nott’s sounds of distress than Fjord was. ‘What is it?’

As though answering his question, and enormous beast burst through the trees. A beast that Fjord did not recognize straight away.

It took him several seconds to realize what the animal was. They weren’t native to Wildemount, he knew, but when he was a boy, living in an orphanage in Port Damali, he had seen the traveling salesman boast the rarity of a pair of small tiger cubs. This was the same creature, only much, much larger.

‘What the fuck is that?’ he said.

‘It’s Beau!’ Nott wailed. ‘She was making out with Yasha, and things were getting hot and heavy, and she just—’ Fjord didn’t need to hear the rest of what Nott was saying. He could put the pieces together. First transformations were often preceded by experiences of heightened emotions, or increased physical activity.

It was a wild, feral creature; had Fjord not known it was one of his closest friends, he would have assumed that it was an actual tiger, looking to kill them all. The animal snarled, and a second later, Yasha came through the trees after it.

The rest of them had realized the enormity of the situation now; Molly and Jester were watching, horrified, as the tiger stalked towards them, growling ferociously. Fjord summoned his sword, and Jester turned on him.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t attack Beau.’

Fjord hesitated. If he had to make a choice between hurting one friend to save the rest of them...well, he would make that choice. The sword wasn’t silver; she would survive. In all honesty, he was pretty sure that the sword wouldn’t do that much anyway. Fire and silver, those were the traditional ways to kill a shapeshifter; they’d already killed a whole heap with fire, but the last thing they wanted was to kill this one.

It roared again, and pounced towards Yasha, who seemed disinclined to leave the tiger’s side.

‘Yasha, what in the nine hells are you doing?’ Molly yelled. Yasha had taken off her sword, and was starting to unlace her shirt.

‘Go!’ Yasha said. ‘All of you, go!’ To Fjord’s side, Caleb was already starting to pack his things up.

‘Yasha—’ Molly started. He sounded more desperate than frantic. Pleading, almost.

‘The more people this takes, the messier it’s going to be,’ Yasha said. ‘I’m the only one that can handle her on my own.’

Fjord hesitated. She wasn’t wrong, but it still felt like a bad idea to leave her alone with a feral were-tiger. Even a lion would have been bad enough. He didn’t know who would win in a fight between a tiger and a bear, but he didn’t want to stick around to find out. Giving Yasha a nod, he took Jester by the shoulder.

‘We need to go, _now_,’ he said. They grabbed what things they could, and ran, trying to ignore the sound of a brawl in their wake.

…

‘I’m the only one that can handle her on my own,’ Yasha said, without even stopping to look that the rest of the Mighty Nein were making their escape. She had already divested herself of her shirt, and her pants. Shifting while wearing clothes was always messy.

Beau’s clothes were lying in tatters on the ground behind them, barely recognizable as clothes at all. Even less recognizable was Beau herself; an angry, feral animal with little to no control over its own actions.

Beau had always been a little bit angry, but in a good way. It was a fiery sort of passionate anger that Yasha admired.

The tiger seemed like it was all muscle; Beau was somewhat muscular, but it was a different sort of muscle. Yasha always found the muscles changing to be one of the most painful parts of shapeshifting, so it couldn’t have been an easy process, even for a first shifting.

The tiger snarled, and pounced again. Yasha was not quite fast enough this time, and fell backwards underneath the claws.

With an angry roar of her own, Yasha shifted. She felt the familiar agony of skin splitting, of her body enlarging, of fur springing up all over her body. She felt her hands and her feet morph into enormous paws, nails into claws.

Yasha had been ten years old the first time she shifted. It was one of the rituals of the Dolohov Tribe. She had been worried and scared and all of those things, even though she had been prepared for it.

To someone who was not prepared for it, it was no doubt a harrowing experience. But, she was fairly certain that Beau had no shortage of harrowing experiences in her life.

Now fully in bear form, Yasha pushed the tiger (pushed Beau) off of her. She gave a harrowing roar that would have sent lesser creatures fleeing in terror, but this tiger was made of stronger stuff than that.

It was kind of funny. The were form took what you were in life and sort of...amplified it. This tiger was stubborn as fuck. It swiped, and snarled, and bit. Yasha felt a white hot pain across her snout. Her feelings, and thoughts, and decisions were all muted, drowned out by the roar of the bear. She had been a bear long enough not to control it, but to at the very least be able to work with it. It was like water; if you tried to fight it, it would only drown you faster.

The bear wanted to fight.

Yasha did not want to fight.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She wanted to fight in so much as she wanted to get Beau under control, but she didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Well...she didn’t want Beau to get hurt. If Yasha got hurt, then that was an acceptable outcome.

Unfortunately, the bear didn’t quite get that message. It met every swipe, every claw, every bite with an attack of its own, until the two of them were both so covered in cuts and scrapes that the ground was bloody.

Yasha was winning, but not by much.

Finally, she managed to get a lucky strike in that took the tiger to the ground. Instead of retaliating, it instead gave a horrific moan that sounded almost human, and its eyes fluttered closed.

_No_. Yasha broke through the bear’s control, and gave another wild roar. The bear fell away almost entirely, and she fell to the ground as she shifted back, breathing heavily. Already, some of the more minor wounds were starting to stitch themself up.

On the ground, the unconscious tiger turned back into an unconscious human. Yasha did not even think before putting her hands to Beau’s shoulder, and healing. It was barely anything, and the majority of wounds did not go away.

Night had fallen, but with her Darkvision, Yasha could see the horrific mass of scars that covered Beau’s body. Many of them looked old – years or decades old – and must have come from her family. Yasha clenched her fist. She was very glad, in that moment, that they had slaughtered all of them.

She went and found her shawl where she had cast it aside, and laid it gently over Beau’s form. It felt like an age ago that Beau had flirtatiously asked for it to sit on. Yasha wished she’d given it to her then. She set out a bedroll, and maneuvered Beau onto it. Then, a spark of inspiration hitting her, she found a healing potion, and poured it down Beau’s throat. Some of the nastier wounds seemed to disappear, and the breathing (which Yasha hadn’t noticed until it changed) seemed to ease a bit. In any case, Yasha felt comfortable enough in preparing her own bedroll, if not to sleep, then at least to lie down next to Beau, and make sure nothing happened.

It would be better if the others did not come back yet. If Jester messaged, Yasha would tell them as much. She wanted Beau to be able to process what had happened in relative privacy before bringing the rest of the group into it. It an opportunity that Yasha wished had been afforded to her, all those years ago.

An hour or so later, the message came.

_Hi Yasha it’s Jester, is everything okay? Is Beau okay? Please tell me she’s okay, and she didn’t hurt you, and that you’re okay, and—_

Yasha blinked. She had almost fallen asleep for a moment there, and the message had jerked her back to wakefulness.

‘We are both...alive,’ she said, knowing that it probably wasn’t the best way to deliver the message. ‘Beau is sleeping, but I think it would be best for know if you don’t return yet. I will look after Beau.’ Yasha didn’t know how long the message was supposed to be, but she thought she managed to get the point across.

Jester’s reply, when it came, was doubtful. _Fjord and Caleb and Molly agree with you, but please be safe, and maybe yell out really really loudly if you need us, tell Beau—_

Yasha didn’t know what she was supposed to tell Beau, but she assumed that it was more than likely words of reassurance. The fire was still going – no-one had bothered to put it out as they made their escape – so Yasha found some dry wood, and fed it a bit more. Caduceus’s tea had been knocked over in the scuffle.

She brushed a few stray hairs out of Beau’s face. In sleep, Beau looked far more peaceful, far least stressed than she did while awake. Yasha wished she could say that she felt the same peace.

Though she knew the danger had passed, she was half afraid that Beau would turn again. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she was up to the fight. She just didn’t want Beau to have to go through that again. A first shift was a traumatic experience whichever way you sliced it, and for someone that had had more traumatic experiences than most, lately, it was the last thing that any of them needed.

Nothing happened.

Yasha sat upright against a tree, not daring to let herself lie down. Beau continued to sleep until not long after the first rays of light started to peek over the horizon.

Then, she woke up.


	22. Twenty-Two

Twenty-Two

Beau’s whole body ached. She was bleeding, and bruised, and broken all over, feeling like she’d gone a dozen rounds against a fire giant. There were gashes along her chest, and across her arms and legs, and she was fairly certain that most of her ribs were broken. She had a shawl wrapped around her that she recognized as Yasha’s.

After a minute or so, things started to come back to her. The ripping pain, and the fear and the rage. She had shifted. It had felt like her whole body had been torn apart, and put back together again the wrong way.

Beau rolled over (_oh gods fuck that hurts_) and vomited. Clearly she had fought something (someone?) while she was shifted, and she hoped to Ioun that she hadn’t killed them. She vomited again, and this time there was barely anything to come up.

That was a good thing (not that dry retching was ever a good thing) because it meant she probably hadn’t eaten anything while...she hadn’t been a lion. She had been aware enough during the whole experience that she knew that much. She’d always assumed that if she was ever going to shift, she would be a lion. So what the fuck had she turned into?

A hand was suddenly on her shoulder, and she started, fists clenched, turning to face her attacker.

‘How do you feel?’

Yasha looked about as good as Beau felt. There were three parallel slashes across her face, still oozing blood. Beau realized, suddenly, who she had fought. She retched again.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Beau muttered, unable to stop the tears from starting to flow. ‘Gods, Yash...I’m so sorry.’

Yasha seemed entirely unperturbed. ‘I have been subject to worse,’ she said, ‘From people who actually _wanted_ to hurt me. It was your first shift; they are always violent. The next one will not be so bad.’ Her hand stroked Beau’s back in an almost comforting sort of manner, and Beau hated that it kind of made her feel a little better.

‘Good to know,’ Beau said, darkly. She had never really planned for this eventuality. All her life, she’d been resigned to the fact that she would never be a shapeshifter, would never be a were-lion like the rest of her her family. Of course, she _still_ wasn’t a were-lion. She could remember at least that much.

‘What was I?’ she asked Yasha, who was rummaging through her bag to find the frying pan. Thank the Gods that Yasha was the one that carried most of the heavy gear. ‘I know I wasn’t a lion. I’ve never seen lions move like that.’

‘A tiger, I think you call them,’ Yasha said. Beau raised an eyebrow. She’d never met a single were-tiger in her life. Judging by the fact that her parents had spent most of her childhood calling her a bastard, though, she guessed that her real father must have been a were-tiger. Not that his name, or even the fact that he existed had ever been mentioned in her presence. She didn’t even know whether or not he knew she existed.

‘Huh,’ Beau said. If were-lions were rare, then were-tigers were even rarer. She didn’t think she’d _ever _heard of any were-tigers on Wildemount, or even just _tigers_. She’d seen them in books, of course, though. There were tigers on Marquet, but she’d never even_ been_ to Marquet. ‘Weird.’

Yasha put a hand to Beau’s shoulder, and gave the last of her healing energy. Beau felt a few wounds close up slightly, felt a couple of ribs click back into place. So often, she’d seen Yasha knock down enemies with her enormous bear strength. She never considered the possibility that one day she’d be on the wrong end of it.

‘Thanks for stopping me from hurting them,’ Beau said, realizing suddenly how things must have gone down. ‘Sorry about the...’ She gestured towards Yasha’s face.

‘They will heal,’ Yasha said, gently. She threw a dozen or so strips of cured meat into the pan, followed by another dozen or so eggs. Thank the gods Caduceus hadn’t had time to grab his bag, though why (and _how?_) he had fresh eggs, Beau couldn’t explain. It was just one of those Caduceus things.

Beau couldn’t explain why, but she always found breakfast on the road, cooked over the heat of an open flame, to be such a comforting thing. She certainly needed it now, in the freezing cold Horisal morning, Yasha’s shawl wrapped around her. The fire wasn’t nearly hot enough to cook it quickly, so they had a bit of time before breakfast was actually ready.

‘Yes, we are safe,’ Yasha said, as though talking to the air. Jester must have been messaging her. ‘Beauregard is awake.’ She looked towards Beau, and Beau froze. She didn’t particularly want to face the rest of the party. After everything they had helped her through, after everything they had done for her, she had almost killed them. ‘She needs some time to recover, so I think it would be best if you did not come back yet.’

Beau felt a wave of relief wash over her. She knew she could not put off facing them forever, but if she could get even just a few hours to process what had happened, then she would feel a lot better about doing it.

‘Do you want to get dressed?’ Yasha asked, gently. Beau looked down and realized that she was wearing nothing under the shawl. Her clothes were in tatters, strewn around the place. She made to get up, before realizing that she simply did not have the energy.

‘There, ah...There’s some stuff in my bag,’ she said. ‘Can you...’ Yasha did not even wait for Beau to finish. She went for the bag, and dug through it to find some clean, undamaged clothes. The fact that many of her wounds were still bleeding meant that these would be pretty dirty before she’d even finished tying her sash, but at least they were clothes. As expected, blood from the wounds that Yasha hadn’t quite managed to heal started to seep through the cloth almost immediately.

‘Is that whole “changing without warning” thing likely to happen again?’ Beau asked. In all the books she’d read (which was a fucking lot), she’d never come across those little, mundane details.

‘I...uh...’ Yasha hesitated. ‘The first few months are always a bit volatile,’ she admitted. ‘Until you can control it, changes occur in response to a heightened emotional state.’

‘So, don’t get emotional,’ Beau surmised. She had never considered herself a particularly emotional sort of person, but it was like telling someone they weren’t allowed to think of the word “rabbit.” Suddenly “emotional” was the only state of being that Beau could possibly see herself in.

With Yasha’s help (and Beau’s cheeks burning red), Beau dressed, hoping like hell she wasn’t going to tear apart these clothes, too. They were the only set she had left.

‘You can maybe get Jester to _Mend _them,’ Yasha said, gesturing to the ruined clothes.

‘Yeah,’ Beau said, but she wasn’t sure how successful that would be. They were practically torn to shreds. That would take a fuckton of cantrips.

Beau managed to drag herself over so she was sitting on a log next to the fire, which was still burning merrily. Yasha had clearly been feeding it in the time that they’d been there alone. Yasha hovered behind her, clearly wanting to help, but not wanting to crowd Beau.

Hesitating, she sat down next to Beau. There was a long stretch of silence. ‘May I...May I put my arm around you?’ Yasha asked.

‘I guess,’ Beau shrugged. Once upon a time, she would have been thrilled by such a request. Now, it seemed to be the result of pity, rather than any sort of actual affection. No. That wasn’t true. Beau remembered, now, what they had been doing the previous day, right before she had shifted. Well she’d ruined _that_.

They sat sort of awkwardly in front of the fire, Yasha shifting every couple of moments to adjust the bacon. She knew, clearly, that Beau liked it near burnt, the eggs cooked through.

Beau took her time eating; Yasha had cooked enough for ten people, and Beau ate almost all of it herself. Yasha seemed content with a few slices of bacon and a couple of the smaller eggs. ‘So...um.’ She paused. She didn’t quite know how to broach the subject. ‘Before...y’know…We were...’ She faltered.

‘Kissing?’ Yasha said, mildly amused. Beau got the impression that she’d been waiting for Beau to feel comfortable enough to bring up the matter.

‘Yeah, that.’ Beau bit her lip. Yasha, arm still around Beau’s shoulder, squeezed slightly, and Beau felt suddenly more brave. ‘I don’t know if you’d be interested in doing it again sometime, but...you know. Offer’s there.’

Beau could sense the slight grin on Yasha’s face as she turned, and kissed Beau on the cheek. ‘Like that?’

‘It’s a pretty good start.’

They lazed away the rest of the afternoon. Beau eventually found the energy to stand, and stretch out all of her muscles, knowing that if she didn’t, she would regret it the next day.

Around three o’clock Jester messaged Yasha again, and Beau gave the nod, that she was ready to face the rest of the group.

She didn’t particularly _want_ to face them, but it was better to get it over with.

They arrived fifteen later, looking both cautious and worried. Beau, sitting by the fire, playing with a stick, kept her gaze downcast.

‘Sorry guys,’ she said, in what she hoped was a nonchalant voice. It came out a few tones higher than her normal speaking voice, and sounded very much put-upon, so she decided to drop it.

‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything.’ Jester leaned down, and wrapped Beau in a tight hug, accompanying the gesture with a glowing green light. The wounds that Yasha hadn’t managed to heal seemed to vanish in an instant, but the exhaustion, and the stains, and the full-body ache remained.

‘Thanks, Jes.’ Beau smiled, in spite of herself.

‘We’ve all been there,’ Molly said, and Beau was a little bit surprised. The words meant a little more, coming from Molly, who she’d always been a little on edge with. ‘I first shifted in the middle of a threesome with two very attractive half-elves who were weirdly into it.’ Beau snorted. Molly was lying through his teeth, but the fact that he was lying to make her feel better was strangely comforting.

‘Here.’ Caduceus handed her a cup of tea that she hadn’t even noticed him boiling. ‘That’s a nice chamomile blend, from the Carrick family. I find this one always calms me a little.’

‘Thanks,’ Beau muttered. She took the cup in her hands, and let it warm them for a few minutes, before finally taking a sip. It was pretty nice, for tea, though she’d never really been much of a tea drinker. ‘It’s not that bad every time, is it?’ she asked, voicing the fear that had been consuming her since she’d first woken up, naked and bleeding into Yasha’s shawl. She didn’t quite trust Yasha’s assurance that it got better.

‘Nah,’ Fjord said, nonchalantly. ‘First time is always the worst.’

‘Cool.’ Even with his words, Beau was not looking forward to the next full moon. Or the next time she got emotional. Or the next time she accidentally stepped on a crack and set off some unknown catalyst to make her shift. Before she could even think to stop herself, tears had welled in the corner of her eyes, and she had to bite back a wracking sob. She had thought she was ready for this.

Jester, still standing close by, noticed. ‘Oh, Beau, it’s okay. We’ll all be here to help you through it.’ She sat down on the log next to Beau, and pulled her in closely. Beau relished the warm, non-judgmental touch that only her _real_ family could give her. Nothing like the mixed message sort of hugs that Mother used to give.

‘It’s not that.’ Beau shook her head. ‘I just...I never wanted this. I spent my whole life trying to distance myself from the family that made my life a living hell, and this...this only makes me more like them.’

‘Well,’ Molly pointed out. ‘You’re a tiger, not a lion, right? That makes you different.’ That wasn’t the point, and Beau was pretty sure that Molly knew it. A shifter was a shifter, regardless of whether it was a lion or a tiger.

‘Meaning we’re exactly like your family,’ Molly said, nodding, after she made a scathing, and probably unnecessary comment. ‘Got it.’

‘Molly...’ Yasha said, in a chastising sort of voice. Once again, though, Molly had made her feel slightly better, even if this time had been unintentional. Not all shifters were the same, and the last few months of traveling with her friends had made that point abundantly clear.

They stuck around for the rest of the day. No-one felt particularly like moving on, least of all Beau, exhausted, bruised and still a little bit broken.

As the sun started to set, Caduceus got started on dinner; a nice, hearty stew with vegetables he’d pulled seemingly from nowhere.

‘Beau, could you give me a hand?’ he asked. He handed her a wooden bowl, before she’d even had the chance to say yes.

‘This is an old recipe my grandmother taught me,’ he said. ‘For when you’re deep in the woods, and need a bit of a pick-me-up.’ He showed her how to mix flour and water and salt, plus some butter, which she wasn’t entirely sure where he managed to get it from. The meat that they carried was at least cured, and the eggs could last a few days outside of a coldroom, but butter, she was sure, would have melted. Probably a Cleric thing, she decided, and it wasn’t until later that Beau remembered she could have just asked. She maybe just took it a little bit for granted that Caduceus had a strange ability to pull miracles out of nowhere.

It was something that she kind of needed right now.

The sun started to set, and a cold chill started to rise, but Beau was close enough to the fire that she didn’t feel it. With stew, and bread, and Yasha’s shawl wrapped around her shoulders (and Yasha’s hand squeezed around her own), Beau watched, smiling as Jester and Molly talked animatedly about one thing or another, and Fjord was chatting with Caduceus about the Wildmother, and Caleb and Nott were bent low over Caleb’s spellbook. It was...it was nice.

Beau leaned her head against Yasha’s shoulder and went to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, epilogue!


	23. Epilogue

Epilogue

They made their way south to Zadash, taking no particular care to rush. Consequently, in spite of what had happened, they were some of the most enjoyable days of Beau’s life. It seemed silly given that they hardly seemed to do anything at all.

She listened to Jester read smut, and watch Fjord run after Nott for trying to steal his pants, and held Yasha’s hand whenever she didn’t feel like it was too cheesy a moment to do so.

They arrived in Zadash early in the evening about a week before the full moon. Beau had always sort of measured time by the phases of the moon, only she had far more of a vested interest in doing so. It wouldn’t do well for her to be stuck in the middle of the city with nowhere to transform when the moon rose.

‘You know what I could go for,’ Molly said, conversationally, as they set their bags down under the table at the _Leaky Tap_. Beau vividly remembered what had happened the last time she had stayed here, and made careful note not to try and climb through any of the windows. ‘A nice, hot bath. A big pool of honesty where we all get naked.’

‘Oooh!’ Jester immediately sounded excited. ‘We could hire one of those _really_ big baths, where you get like...cucumbers, and free towels, and robes and stuff...I always used to sneak into the big one in Nicodranas, and steal peoples’ clothes.’

It did not take long for the rest of the party to agree to the idea. It had been a long road, and they were all more than a little bit smelly. It wasn’t until they had stowed their bags at the inn, and had made their way to the bathhouses that Beau realized that communal bathing meant that she would be revealing a lot more than she had bargained for.

Half of her wanted to turn back; to make another excuse to run away, and hide her problems from the group. She couldn’t do that, though. Not after everything that they had done for her. If that meant baring a bit of skin, then...well, that was a price she could stand to pay.

They got their fancy robes, and towels, and slippers, and paid a frankly exorbitant cost of five gold per person. An elegant looking elven man led them down the hallway, not trying particularly hard to hide his disgust at the smell that they were giving off.

‘You know, you’re right,’ Jester said, after a particularly gregarious sniff. ‘Maybe we should go and _have a bath_.’

The elven man (not looking in the slightest way abashed) directed them into a large room, where a bath filled with steaming water awaited them. Jester and Molly didn’t even wait for the door to close before stripping off their robes, modesty be damned, and sliding in. Fjord and Caleb were a little slower, but they didn’t not seem to hesitate, either. Caduceus was utterly perplexed at the idea of a large, communal bath, and Nott steadfastly refused to get in at all, instead, sitting on the edge, and watching the rest of them with her eagle eyes.

Yasha was waiting for Beau. ‘Are you okay?’ she said. She hadn’t made any comment when Beau had declined to put on her robe, but the concern was evident on her brow.

‘Yeah, I’m good,’ Beau said. She hesitated.

Yasha had seen her scars, but she didn’t particularly want anyone else to see them. Then, this was something of a pool of honesty, so to speak. If they were airing dirty laundry, then she might as well air all of it. Beau slipped her tunic over her head, and braced herself for the stares.

She supposed that Yasha must have warned them, because while they did sort of stare, they all looked like they were trying very hard not to say anything. Her body looked like someone had used it as a chew-toy, which was pretty much exactly what had happened.

Beau lowered herself into the water, relishing the heat against her tired muscles. For all that they had taken the journey easy, it had still been a long fucking way from Rexxentrum to Zadash, and she’d turned into a fucking tiger partway through. It was nothing compared to some of the things they done, like fighting a group of bandits, or a bunch of gnolls, or fiends.

That said, she didn’t really remember much of what had happened_ while_ she had been shifted, save for the fact that she and Yasha had fought (and Yasha had quite handily won).

There was a nice new scar along the side of her abdomen from that fight, where Yasha’s claws had sliced out a chunk of skin. It was a pretty badass scar, to be honest. Not that anyone would ever get the chance to see it again after today. At least, that was her initial plan.

‘Oh, man, that feels good,’ Beau said. ‘Why the fuck do we not do this after every full moon?’

‘Because it cost _five gold_,’ Nott said, angrily. ‘Who wants to pay five gold to sit in _water_ for an hour?

‘We are literally paying five gold to sit in the water now,’ Molly said, sardonically. Nott brushed him away. ‘Anyway,’ Molly continued. ‘Elephant in the room. Or should I say, tiger in the room…Since this is a pool of honesty and all.’

Beau rolled her eyes. She was long past the point that the mention of a tiger would cause her any concern. ‘If you’ve got something to say, asshole, then say it.’

‘Hey, I’m just curious.’ Molly shrugged. ‘Come from a family of were-lions, and then break the curse, and suddenly you’re a tiger. There’s gotta be a story there.’

‘Molly,’ Yasha started, but Beau put a hand on her shoulder.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘My father...’ she started. ‘Well, he was my father, but he wasn’t actually my father, if that makes sense. He raised me, if you could call it that, but I never met my real father, as far as I know. I guess he must have been a tiger, and when the curse broke...’ She trailed off.

There was a long silence, broken by Jester’s excited squeal.

‘Omigosh!’ The tiefling wrapped an arm around her. ‘You can help me find my dad, and then I’ll help you find yours!’ Beau balked. She wasn’t even sure she particularly wanted to know who her biological father was. It wasn’t as though it mattered; he hadn’t bothered to come and find her, so why should she go and find him? The only thing he’d ever given her was a shitty childhood under someone else’s care, and the ability to turn into a murderous tiger. That was, of course, assuming he even knew that she existed.

Yeah. No. Better to put it in the past along with everything else. It wasn’t something that she needed to think about.

They finished off their bath, and made their way back to the _Leaky Tap_ for dinner. Yasha ate quickly, and excused herself upstairs, to the room that she had booked for herself alone. Beau had an inkling as to the purpose of that, and had to stop herself from wolfing down her own meal too quickly to follow.

‘I uh...’ Beau said, as she left the table. ‘I got some stuff I gotta go do.’

Molly and Jester both gave a grin, and a wink. ‘Have fun!’ Jester said.

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ Molly called after her, as she made her way to the stairs. Beau gave him the finger.

Beau knocked on the door to Yasha’s room, and it opened almost immediately. Beau leaned against the doorframe, as sexily as she could muster. ‘Did somebody order room service?’

Yasha frowned. ‘Were you still hungry? I can have them send up food if you want.’

Beau faltered. ‘No, I…Never mind. Can I come in?’

‘Yes, that is the idea.’ A small smirk played on the edge of Yasha’s lips. Beau stepped inside.

Yasha was still wearing her traveling clothes, but had lit several candles in the room.

‘I wanted to fill the room with flowers,’ Yasha said, frowning slightly. ‘But then I thought that that might be too much.’

Beau grinned. ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ she said. She stepped forward, and kissed Yasha on the lips. Yasha kissed her back for several minutes, before grabbing her shoulders, and steering her backwards towards the bed.

‘We ah...do not have to do anything,’ Yasha said. Beau stared at her.

‘Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever met me, Yash? I never let a deal go unsealed.’

Yasha rolled her eyes at that comment. ‘You are very brash, I will give you that much.’

Beau fell backwards onto the bed, and pulled Yasha with her. ‘You know, there’s still a chance I could turn into a tiger,’ she said, knowing that it would not happen. The circumstances were entirely different. Tonight, she was more in control of her emotions than she ever had been.

‘Let’s save that for the full moon, shall we?’ Yasha smiled. She pressed a light kiss to Beau’s clavicle, and Beau keened.

If anyone of the Mighty Nein heard screaming in the inn that night, then they didn’t care to mention it the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look, this is done.
> 
> I don't think I planned for it to be this long, but here it is.
> 
> Next up...I got a possible Tomb Raider AU in the works, plus maybe some smut and/or oneshots. Let me know what you want to see!

**Author's Note:**

> Because absolutely the thing I need to be doing right now is starting another story. This may get a little dark, because if the first chapter hasn't clued you in, Beau's family are...well, pretty evil.


End file.
